In Praise of the Chordettes

Last September St. Mark's had a 50s party and I downloaded a few tunes to play at the event. One of them was "Mr. Sandman" by the Chordettes. What a GREAT song! Hearing the precision of the harmony and rhythm of these women is really a revelation. This tune went by thousands of times on scratchy AM radios, and people loved it. Listen to it now on CD in full fidelity and it's nothing short of amazing.

The Chordettes' other big hit was "Lollipop." Remember? "Lollipop, lollipop, oh, lolly, lolly, lolly...."

Thumpa but No Bumpa

For some reason, lately I have little patience for radio yakking in the car. Even NPR, though I devoted 26 years of my life to it. I can't even take cool alternative-yaking on alternative radio stations. (Alternative to what, you may ask. Good question.)

So I listen to CDs. Different stuff, but lately I've become quite fond of dance music while driving. Lately it's a double CD of mixes by Benny Benassi. I'm going to get huge subwoofers so I can drive by your house and entertain you. Thumpa-thumpa-thumpa. thumpa, thumpa-thumpa.

It's fun music, kinesthetic. My mind is not taxed--I can think and enjoy the drive and the scenery on my way to work. I like driving. Especially after the car dealer informed my that my car could corner at 130 mph. Please understand that I'm not dangerous, though I do love leaving large speeding SUVs way behind around curves. With the dance-floor pulse surging through me.

In our confusing world, one must enjoy what one can. Mustn't one?

20 Minutes and the iPod Backlash

It's raining in San Diego. We've spent the day inside, reading and listening to music. We have listened to nothing but records. I'm up every 20 minutes or so to turn the record over or change it. I like this experience. It makes music-listening intentional. I select the record, look at the cover, take it out of its jacket, put it on the turntable, and listen to 20 minutes of music by the same artist or artists.

I also like shuffle on iTunes, but it's different. Shuffle is great because you don't know what's coming next--listening is full of revelatory surprises. Under critical listening, it can sound superb. And it's very easy to use shuffle for background when you're doing other things.

But record-listening is unique. It's very analog--you are putting on a black disc with grooves that cause a stylus to vibrate to the tune of the music. If you want to be totally analog, you can send that through tube amplifiers to your speakers, and there's not a single conversion of the signal to ons-and-offs or ones-and-zeroes. Transistor amplification uses ons-and-offs, while tube amplification depends on waves, like a theramin, translating small waves into bigger waves.

More important is the tactile and visual nature of records--touching and looking at the cover art, feeling the disc, watching the turntable spin. It's a many-faceted experience, all supporting listening to music.

I think lots of folks are discovering this, which is why record and turntable sales are growing again, and why so many artists are releasing new music on EPs and LPs.

It makes life good.

Rationality and Jazz

As we start the year, here's hoping that the sense of general rationality will continue. In that vein, David Brooks is great.

As always, we listened to tons of music during 2009. Perhaps our best "discovery" of the year was Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis, whose 1950s records with Shirley Scott are sensational. I also learned this year that Billie Holiday recorded in the 1950s, and some of those performances and recordings are extraordinary. There is a beautiful John Coltrane/Johnny Hartman record on Impulse that's been very well remastered.

2009 was the year we had an FM antenna put on our roof so we could listen to KKJZ in Long Beach as well as Jazz88 in San Diego. We're also enjoying LA's KUSC. More about classical music later.

All of Bach, Beethoven and Mozart for a Pittance

Video: The American Idol 2008

American Idol

Quote of the day:
“I don’t feel we did wrong in taking this great country away from them. There were great numbers of people who needed new land, and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves.”
--John Wayne. (Don’t mention this quote in Orange County or you will immediately be arrested.)

A deadly storm in Myanmar, a world grain crisis, political conflict in Zimbabwe, a presidential primary in Indiana and North Carolina, suicide bombings in Iraq.

And all America is saying to itself, “It’s going to be David versus David in the ‘American Idol’ finale.”

Indeed, let’s get down to the real news. There are four contestants left: two strong ones and two weaker ones. Surely Syesha will be going home this week or next.

And so will Jason, in spite of his “adorable, sensitive, childlike, reggae-guy” thing. These compelling traits evidently have managed to disguise only a passable singing ability and what seems to be either a confused or a cooly ironic disinterest in the competition. Is he stoned or what? He’s a regular shadow of Sanjaya.

Though, fortunately, just a shadow. And not of your smile. Or anyone’s smile.

Overall, “American Idol” has been stronger this year, in both the singing ability of the contestants (yes, Carly went home too early--there are not enough voters for woman rockers) and in the quality of the production. I’d say about three out of four shows this season have been quite entertaining--compared to past years’ average of one out of two.

I like David Archuletta. His voice is truly amazing. Imagine a 17-year-old with a gift like that. He is extraordinary, and I hope he finds his way into a great career.

David Cook is the favorite to win. While his voice is not as singular as the other David, he is more versatile. He is a natural on-stage performer, and he has a strong creative gift for choosing and arranging songs. These are intuitive things that can’t be taught.

He’s probably quite a good songwriter, too. I’m sure we’ll get a chance to hear his original work sometime in the next year.

Four to go.

Or, more correctly, three to go and one to stay.

Young@Heart

Quote of the day:
“If we’ve learned any new rule in the 2008 campaign, it’s this: Once our news culture sets a story in stone, chances are it will crumble. But first it must be recycled louder and louder 24/7, as if sheer repetition will transmute conventional wisdom into reality.”
--Frank Rich, in today’s New York Times

When you’re done reading this, go to your Netflix queue and add “Young@Heart.” Even better, find a theatre showing it and plan to go today or tomorrow. Don’t put it off.

This is the most fun I’ve had at the movies in a long, long time. I was glad to see it in a theatre so I could enjoy others enjoying the film, too.

It’s a documentary about a group of seniors who perform rock music together. I know, it sounds corny with a high potential for condescension and sap.

But there is no condescension or sap, and what corn there is is deliberate and self-aware. This movie is a joy.

There is a variety of singing talent among the members. It is amazing and a hoot to watch a 92-year-old recite “Should I Stay or Should I Go” by the Clash with an authentic knowingness. At another moment in the film, as an 80-year-old began to sing the Talking Heads’ “Life During Wartime” for the first time, Merrie leaned over to me and said “he’s channeling David Byrne!” And he was!

I just used the word “authentic.” “Young@Heart” is so appealingly authentic--we meet these people as they are, and as they discover joy and creativity within themselves. Then they share it with an audience who goes wild and brings the house down.

There is also sadness in the film, and it is treated straightforwardly, without either playing it up or playing it down. It is real and poignant.

The word “poignant” is not in Hollywood dictionaries these days, and this film about defines it.

The other word that perfectly fits this film is “fun.” It was on the screen and in the theatre.

These are funny, real people who love to have fun, and it is the fulfilling purpose for their lives.

Mark your Oscar ballot now. Best Documentary. No one else need apply.

Video: Object of the Week

Buffling Off to Shuffalo

Quote of the day:
“Silly is you in a natural state, and serious is something you have to do until you can get silly again.”
--Mike Myers

I’ve noted before that Merrie and I listen to music every morning. These days we’re sticking mostly to fairly mellow stuff. We need the calming, what with the tornado of a German Shepherd puppy surrounding us so much of the time.

I’ve listened to classical music for most of my life. We had just a few classical records when I was growing up, but they were played a great deal. My father loved Beethoven’s Violin Concerto and his Symphony No. 6, so I practically know those works by heart.

I began playing classical records on the radio when I was in college, first on the campus station (“Welcome to Classical Showcase...”), and then on three public stations in Baltimore, Birmingham and San Diego.

What is this, my resume?

Anyway, we usually play classical music in the mornings. I’ve put most of our CDs on our iMac, and I’ve gotten to like putting them on “shuffle” and listening for hours. It’s like having our own radio station.

There are often some strange juxtapositions, especially since individual cuts from CDs are shuffled. That means there will be a movement from a Schubert string quartet followed by an aria from Puccini’s “La Boheme,” followed by something by John Adams.

I know I will now get hate mail from musicians and classical purists, who emit an odd combination of sobbing and retching when they think of anyone listening to single movements out of the context of the larger work.

But I find it illuminating. We often discover buried treasures in the form of music deep inside an album we haven’t listened to much.

Or it might be a work we have heard a lot, but hearing a piece of it out of context gives it a whole new meaning.

It’s kind of like sitting down, putting on just one song and listening attentively to it. Who knows what we might discover?

Device of the Year Three

Quote of the day:
"I start in the middle of a sentence and move both directions at once."
--John Coltrane, when asked to describe his style.

My third device of the year for 2007 will take some explaining.

When CDs came around in the 1980s, the common wisdom became that all CD players sounded the same. This was based on the change in technology more than it was on actual listening.

With LPs, small variations in turntable speed, tonearm/cartridge design and setup, the condition of the record surface and many other physical factors all have an obvious effect on the sound.

Because CDs were digital--essentially a surface with ones and zeros on it--none of the LPs’ physical problems came into play. So the assumption quickly became that all players sounded the same.

That’s true as long as the signal is digital. Just like any properly-operating computer hard drive will accurately store and retrieve data, any properly-operating CD player will put out an accurate digital signal.

But CD players do not stop with the digital signal. They also convert it to analog. This is where differences come into play. Analog is a more-tricky business than digital. Just like humans are more tricky than machines.

The engineering of any active analog circuit always involves decisions that affect the signal passing through it. There are two such active circuits just before the analog output from any CD player--the circuit that converts the digital signal and the circuit that amplifies the signal so that it can drive your amplifier.

The design of these two circuits affects the sound of a CD player. Well-designed high-quality circuits make a difference.

This is not just an audiophile thing. The difference in sound is quite obvious and pronounced to most people. The thing is, most people haven’t heard such well-designed high-quality circuits.

Manufacturers of CD players are very aware that most everyone thinks all players sound the same. So, to keep costs down, they put in the very cheapest converter and amplifier circuits they can--on one small chip. Not surprisingly, players designed this way sound pretty much the same.

Earlier this year Merrie and I bought a separate digital-analog converter (DAC) and plugged the CD player’s digital output into it. We also hooked up a computer’s digital output.

It’s interesting that there was so much in the music that we hadn’t heard before. It sounds live and real.

LPs are Back

Quote of the day:
“When we got into office, the thing that surprised me the most was that things were as bad as we'd been saying they were.”
--John F. Kennedy

I am an audiophile. I don’t have the singular focus bordering on obsession of most audiophiles, but I am sensitive to acoustics and sound, and I love music.

Merrie and I listen a lot to LPs. Our collection is not huge, but it goes back to my days in radio and before. We also listen a lot to CDs, and we have a fair number of them, too.

Among audiophiles, there’s an ongoing conversation about whether LPs sound better than CDs or vice versa. Most non-audiophiles dismiss this, saying CDs obviously sound better and they don’t have scratches. And they’re smaller and easier.

Most audiophiles get a little snooty when told this, and will think to themselves, “Well, your records wouldn’t be scratched if you took better care of them.” Some invest lots of cash (we’re talking $10,000+) in elaborate turntable setups and heavy-vinyl deep pressings. It can be a serious business.

The truth is that most record albums released since the 1950s can sound pretty darn good on a reasonably-priced, properly set up turntable. It’s amazing, in fact, to put on a record made fifty years ago and hear it come alive. Even if it’s slightly scratched.

I am fascinated that LPs have become fashionable again. Over the last several years, more and more musicians are releasing their music on LP as well as CD.

LPs were kept alive by live DJs and musicians, who used them for scratching and sampling. But it’s gone way beyond that now.

Look at the success of record sellers on the web, and at stores like Amoeba in L.A. and the Bay Area. Here in San Diego, there are several small record stores that seem to be thriving.

Listening to an LP can be more well-rounded than listening to a CD. You have to go to the shelf, peruse, pull the album out, look at the front and back, pull the inner sleeve out, put the record on the turntable and put the arm on the record. Then, 20 minutes later, you have to get up and turn the record over.

The 20-minute thing can be annoying if I’m trying to do something else while listening. Yet because it’s a more-involving process, I often find I’m paying closer attention to the music. It’s usually not just background.

Also, since so many of our records are from the 50s, 60s and 70s, there is a sense of connection to history. Maybe it’s just nostalgia. I remember first getting the record, or where I was when I first heard it, or listening to it with friends.

And the music is still so good. In fact, most of the time, it’s better.

Best Music of 2007

Quote of the day:
“Put your money somewhere not idiotic and leave it alone as much as possible.”
--Ken Jennings, who won more than $3 million on Jeopardy in 2004, when asked for investment advice.

I’ve listened to a lot of music this year. Picking the best is therefore challenging.

As you likely know already, I can be a little slow to discover music, so my selections may have been released a few years ago. I don’t limit my listening to new stuff. This very short list might be entitled “Music I Stumbled on in 2008.”

First is Iron & Wine’s “Our Endless Numbered Days” which came out in 2004. It’s official genre is “alternative,” but I would classify the music as neo-folk. The compositions are mostly acoustic with a light seasoning of rock and roll.

This album is sophisticated, well performed and very well produced. Most important, the music is beautiful.

Second is “Hypnotica” by Benny Benassi and the Biz. I know this will please all the closet ravers out there. Just put this on and bounce in your living room with your arms in the air. Don’t laugh. You know you love it.

I really like the deceptive simplicity of this 2003 release. At first it seems like hundreds of other dance/electronica albums. But listen for a while (and dance, because it’s hard not to) and you’ll find sly, self-aware and surprisingly sophisticated music, very well-performed.

Third is Lise De La Salle’s recording of piano music by Mozart and Prokofiev. She’s 19 years old, and this is her fourth CD. Yes, she’s talented. I wish we’d hear more of her and less Britney Spears.

I usually favor music by more-seasoned performers because I find that experience almost always improves recorded performances. But when I listen to these CDs (it’s a 2-CD set), I am amazed at the sensitivity and insight with which De La Salle plays. Just listen to the last Mozart Variation. It’s extraordinary. And the production is excellent.

Fourth is a classical guitar album perfect for those who want to step beyond Bach transcriptions but stay in the Baroque. It’s a 2007 CD by William Carter called “La Guitarra Espanola.” It is truly stunning.

It’s all music by the Spanish composer Santiago de Murcia (1682-1732), exquisitely played in a state-of-the-art recording. This CD might be a little hard to find. But it’s worth finding.

A Charlie Brown Christmas

Quote of the day:
"Everybody complains of his memory, but nobody of his judgment."
--Francois VI, duke de la Rouchefoucauld (1655)

We’ve been having a lot of fun this year feeding all our Christmas music into iTunes and letting it shuffle. Just like Apple says, it’s like having our own radio station.

We own a dozen CDs of Christmas music, and about 20 LPs. A few are quite good, some are so-so and one or two are highly questionable and rarely played.

Every year we play Vince Guaraldi’s “Charlie Brown Christmas.” It’s become a traditional part of our holiday.

A lot of people are like us, I guess. This Christmas album is one of iTunes’ most-downloaded.

The music is good, of course. But more important, it bonds us to the times we first saw “A Charlie Brown Christmas.”

This is a Christmas tradition from the 20th century that will stick with us for quite a while. It’s like “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas” and stockings from earlier eras. Do you think it’s joined the pantheon of most-important traditions?

I think so. The movie “It’s a Wonderful Life” is climbing the tradition charts, too.

The barking dogs are not climbing, though we will be complaining about them for another 30 years or so.

The 1960s Are Not What You Think

Quote of the day:
“Contrary to the usual understanding, the baby boomers didn’t create the culture of the sixties; they didn’t even inspire it. They consumed it. In 1968, the climax of the decade politically, the oldest baby boomer in America was just turning twenty-two. To the extent that baby boomers participated in protests, took drugs, and practiced ‘free love,’ they were responding to slogans, tastes, and fads dreamed up and promulgated by people much older than they were.”

--Louis Menand

It is common wisdom that the 1960s was a decade of revolution in many ways, including in movies and music. Neither were the same afterward.

Sometimes so much emphasis is put on the 1960s that we forget that what happened then didn’t just drop from the sky.

The amazing change in music and movies also was not the pure result of political rebellion. The much more vital factor in this was the rise, undetected by all except practitioners, of other creative forms.

For example, blues came to prominence in the 20s and 30s. Musicians growing up in the 40s and 50s were invariably exposed to it. And many incorporated it in very creative ways. Some of those efforts became rock and roll.

Experimental film grew into a serious movement in Europe and elsewhere in the 40s and 50s. Great filmmakers coming to maturity in the 1960s were heavily influenced by this.

So most of what we see as a cultural overthrow, a disrespect of authority and established forms, and a general rise in bad behavior caused by long hair and “liberalism,” is really simply the creative combination and alteration of forms that already existed.

Analog in a Digital World

Quote of the day:
“People need difficulties; they are necessary for health.”
--Carl Jung

If we live in a digital world, we are aliens.

We are not digital. My favorite illustration is hearing. When I see debates about the quality of digital versus analog music sources, I never see any mention that our ears are analog.

Sound waves--variations in air pressure--cause the eardrum to vibrate, which causes the small bones behind it to vibrate. Those vibrations are converted back to electrical signals in the brain.

So, unless you want to plug the digital output of your CD player or computer directly into you brain, those digital signals must be converted to analog before you can hear them. And as a massage therapist once said, there’s the rub.

It’s not possible to say definitively that analog (records) sounds better or worse than digital (CDs or computer), because there is so much variety in recording, encoding and playback across all formats.

Some digital formats (such as mp3) ARE compromised because of low sampling rates or signal compression. Sampling rates are reduced and signals are compressed in order to save disc space and speed up download times.

Virtually everyone with normal hearing can detect degradation from analog or uncompressed digital formats to reduced, compressed formats.

The way basic CDs and lossless, uncompressed computer formats are encoded is just fine, as long as there is good source material and there is a well-designed digital-to-analog converter on the listening end.

Most CD players have a conversion circuit that comprises about half a silicon chip, which determines how the unit sounds. That allows record fanatics with good systems to correctly claim that records sound better than CDs.

On the other hand, with a well-designed digital-to-analog converter, a well-recorded CD will sound as good or better than a high-end turntable, arm, cartridge and phono preamp.

Surround Sound is For the Birds

Quote of the day:
“The only people who find what they are looking for in life are the fault finders.”
--Foster's Law

There’s such a fuss these days about surround sound. These audio systems are flying out of Best Buy almost as fast as flat-panel TVs.

I can understand that gamers want sound coming at them from all directions. It heightens the excitement of destroying your opponents, and surround sound puts you in the middle of the action.

Also, I know a lot of folks are blissed out with five or more channels of audio coming at them while watching TV. But the logic of this escapes me.

When you watch TV, you watch a 2-dimensional image that is in front of you. There is no action happening to your sides or behind you. Why do you need sound there?

Seven or eight years ago I was watching “The Sopranos” with a five-channel Dolby Digital setup. I’ll never forget the moment about halfway through when the sound of a door closing came from behind me, to the left. Was AJ coming into our TV room to watch with us? It made no sense.

Shortly after that, I chucked surround sound and opted for stereo.

A case can be made for the ability of a properly set up five-channel system to bring the soundstage out into the room a little, to give it dimension. But because it is very difficult and expensive to correctly set up a system, most are not correctly set up. And much surround-sound source material is still poorly produced.

A much stronger case can be made for investing your money in a better-quality 2-channel setup. Quality over quantity. Stereo is much simpler and fairy easy to set up. And TV audio is surprisingly good, and continues to get better.

You can count on a higher-quality 2-channel sound system to improve things. This is not the case for surround sound or simulated surround sound. It may provide interesting effects, but it does not always improve things.

This is all about entertainment, of course. So if you enjoy having the chainsaw murderer in the room with you (probably coming at you from behind), have fun with surround sound. As for me, I prefer to keep him on the screen.

One more thing. Please don’t claim that five channels sound better or more realistic than stereo. It’s just not so. Sorry.

The Birth of Home Entertainment

Quote of the day:
“One likes people much better when they’re battered down by a prodigious siege of misfortune than when they triumph.”
--Virginia Woolf

Quote of the day no. 2:
"Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration."
--Thomas Alva Edison

Thomas Edison died 76 years ago today, in 1931. There are many people who remember that day, and the stir caused by his death. He was a very influential man whose work changed the world.

He had a very rare combination of skills--brilliant inventor and successful businessman. He was able to bring to market and make money from many of his inventions and those of his collaborators.

My favorite Edison invention is the phonograph, which wound up ushering in the age of home entertainment. Looking back on it, the original phonograph was quite simple in concept: focus sound on a needle, which would then vibrate, and then etch those vibrations on a rotating cylinder.

(Remember that the phonograph recorded on cylinders. The gramophone, which came a bit later, recorded on discs.)

Edison faced a number of mechanical challenges with this invention, including getting the sound loud enough to cause the needle to vibrate. That’s why all the early phonographs have reverse megaphones, so that the sound could be concentrated in one spot.

And it was the reverse for playback, with the sound starting at the small end of the megaphone.

The same technology is in use today, with the added benefit of electronic amplification for both recording and playback. The invention of electronic amplification in the mid-1920s changed everything.

You can hear the voice of Thomas Edison recreating his first publicized test of the phonograph--”Mary had a little lamb”--by clicking here.

Don’t we live in an interesting world?

Writing Music Without Hearing It

Quote of the day:
“Isn’t it interesting how human knowledge and wisdom seem to peak temporarily at age 16?”
--Tom Magliozzi

If you know anything about Beethoven, you likely know about his deafness. He wrote many of his best-known works without ever hearing them performed.

In the 1994 movie “Immortal Beloved,” Gary Oldman did a wonderful job portraying the moment when Beethoven continues to conduct the orchestra with his eyes closed after the musicians are finished playing. The concertmaster turned him around so he could see the appreciative applause of the audience.

In 1802, when he discovered he was deaf, Beethoven wrote that he was tempted to commit suicide. We can all be grateful that he didn’t.

Instead, he began to blaze a “new artistic path,” going beyond the forms of Mozart and Haydn. With ferocious commitment and tremendous energy, he wrote his ninth sonata for violin and piano.

He called it the “Kreutzer” sonata after a violinist whose playing he admired. As things turned out, Kreutzer didn’t care for the music. He called it “incomprehensible.” He never played it.

Bad call, Kreutzer. This sonata, named after you, was a groundbreaking achievement. And it’s now considered one of the best violin sonatas.

"Leonard Cohen, I'm Your Man"

Quote of the day:
“If you can look out your window and see neighbors with lower incomes, you’ll be happier. People are very keen to move into the elite neighborhoods. They don’t realize that they won’t be as happy as they expect. That’s the curse of being human.”
--Andrew Oswald, economics professor at Warwick University in England

As program director of my college radio station I got on-the-job training in what kind of music to play at different times of day. In the morning we had to be especially careful. One thing we wouldn’t play was depressing music.

Leonard Cohen fit very neatly into that category. When one is struggling to wake up in time for an eight o’clock class after a very late night, one is not motivated by hearing someone sing about the ever-present blackening abyss of lonely tortured souls.

I got interested in Cohen when I saw Robert Altman’s excellent “McCabe and Mrs. Miller,” which very effectively used his music. Not only did I buy a copy of “Songs of Leonard Cohen” for myself, I also bought one for the teacher’s assistant of my newspaper editing class. He said he had really liked the movie, and I figured I needed to bribe him because I had blown the last layout.

“Songs of Leonard Cohen” remains one of my favorite albums ever. I gradually came to appreciate that Cohen’s music was not so much “depressing” as searching and poignant.

He is an extraordinary poet and songwriter. In the film “Leonard Cohen, I’m Your Man,” Bono says that Cohen is a very rare talent, and I agree with that.

The film is excellent, and you’ll enjoy it whether or not you know Cohen’s work. It brings together a current interview with Cohen (who’s now 74) with current performances of his songs by Nick Cave, Rufus Wainwright, Linda Thompson, Beth Orton and others.

The performances are very good in their own right. Hearing them juxtaposed with Cohen’s reflections on his creative life and world view is compelling indeed. I found myself further and further involved the longer I watched.

If you rent the DVD, be sure to watch the special features. There is a stunning performance by Teddy Thompson.