Parallel Realities Live (DVD)

  Concert DVDs can be tough to get totally right.  Many of them get too gimmicky with the visual effects (quick cuts between musicians, totally losing any flow of the music), sometimes the 5.1 mixes are a distraction rather than an enhancement, and frankly some artists’ music just doesn’t come across as well live as in the studio.

Recorded 20 years ago, Parallel Realities Live has long been my favorite concert DVD.  It nails all three of the main criteria I have for a concert DVD (in ascending order of importance):

1.  Video:  No frenetic cutting between camera angles, this DVD lets you take in the concert with a nice, relaxed perspective.  It was also shot in 16:9 aspect ratio (surely a rarity in 1990) so it looks great on a widescreen TV.

2. Audio: The obligatory Dolby Digital 5.1 mix sounds very good, and the DVD also includes a PCM stereo (lossless) audio track for your 2 channel listening pleasure.  Superbly recorded and mixed, this one is a gem and sounds better than many CDs.  

3.  The Music:  Talk about a super-group!  Herbie Hancock, Dave Holland and Jack DeJohnette are all among the premier jazz players on their respective instruments, and Pat Metheny is arguably the greatest living jazz guitarist.  The performances here are top notch, and cover a wide range stylistically.  

Another nice thing about this DVD is that you can just pop it into the DVD player and it starts playing, no messing around with a menu required.  This is an excellent release featuring four premier jazz musicians who are playing at the top of their game from start to finish.

Eivind Aarset - Live Extracts

One of the more interesting musical diversions for me in recent years has been Eivind Aarset.  I first heard his music about 5 years ago when I picked up a concert recording off of Dime.  A long time collaborator with Nils Pettter Molvaer of the Nordic “Nu Jazz” movement, Aarset’s music is a sublime mixture of ambient soundscapes, drums-n-bass rhythms, and guitar tones that range from patented Stratocaster clean to downright nasty to “that can’t be a guitar”.

In addition to grabbing Aarset concerts whenever they popped up on Dime, I started buying his studio releases, beginning with his debut “Electronic Noire” and continuing up through 2007’s “Sonic Codex”.  While most of his live shows that I had heard had been in a trio format, the tours following Sonic Codex found Aarset’s band having expanded to a sextet.  The resulting density of the sound is very compelling.

Now I have a long standing preference for live music, and enjoy artists who don’t try to recreate the studio version of a song onstage but instead make it something new every time it’s played.  (The studio version of the Dead’s “Dark Star” was 2:40, on 1969’s Live/Dead it’s 23:18 - that’s making something new!).  Aarset’s music takes on a very different breadth and scope when played live.

The CD starts off in a very ambient space with “Electromoers”, which flows into an epic 10 minute “Electromagnetic” that builds from a subtle melody to an all out industrial attack.  Some seriously heavy shit.  In fact the most noticeable difference between the studio versions of these songs and their presentation here is the huge dynamic range, the contrast between the ambient valleys and the intense peaks of the music.  

Drøbak Saray and Still Changing are two other particularly strong songs, with Drøbak Saray having a nice middle-eastern influenced melodic hook.  But this CD isn’t about melody, it’s about soundscapes of varying intensity.  One of my favorite releases of 2010 for sure.

Buying Music Online in Lossless Format

Most of my recent music buying has been used CDs via Amazon.  I can't bring myself to pay $10 for an MP3 version of a CD when I can get the CD itself for about the same price.  (Amazon's MP3 encoding is perfectly fine, as far as I can tell they use LAME by default, with most CDs encoded at 256K or V-0 which to most people is indistinguishable from lossless).

But personally, for the right price I'd much rather be able to download the music in full CD quality.

HD Tracks has a pretty decent library of lossless music at around $12 for a CD, including a good portion of the ECM catalog.  And recently I picked up a couple of Eivind Aarset releases from Gube Music which appears to primarily carry music by nordic artists, again for about $12 after the exchange rate.  (I'm currently also working on a post about Aarset's "Live Extracts CD).  No DRM, liner notes & cover art in PDF format, I could get very used to buying music this way, I hate having to wait a week for the CD to get here in the mail.

Juxtaposition

One of the things that happens given the way I listen to music (I use a playlist of about 20 albums - yes I still call them albums - that I update and sync to my iPhone every Sunday, then start at the beginning on Monday and play it straight through) is that I get some interesting juxtapositions of music.  This morning when I fired the music up getting ready for work I was in the middle of "Gateway", the first release by the Gateway Trio of John Abercrombie, Dave Holland and Jack DeJohnette.  Great album, amazing band.  I think I only got the last track or two in, and then it was Jethro Tull's "Nothing is Easy - Live at the Isle of Wight 1970".  Another great band, but just a tad of a shift in genres there!

To Shred Or Not To Shred, That Is The Question

Over the weekend I grabbed a remastered version of the Carlos Santana / John McLaughlin show from Berkeley, CA (9/5/73).  The pair did a brief tour in support of their "Love Devotion Surrender" album, and the Chicago show from that tour has been widely circulated from a recording of the FM broadcast.  The Berkeley show is also from an FM recording, and the overall quality is very good.

Both of these guys were at creative peaks around this time with Santana having recorded the epic "Lotus" live album a couple of months prior in Japan, while McLaughlin's Mahavishnu Orchestra was breaking up after releasing two seminal fusion recording over the previous two years.

Propelled by Billy Cobham's insistent drumming, the relatively simple arrangements build a base for relentless guitar dueling between Carlos and John.  Khalid Yasin (aka Larry Young) on organ, Doug Rauch on bass and Armando Peraza on congas round out the band.  There is some incredible guitar playing during this show, and there is nothing subtle about this musical assault.  Highly recommended.

Disc 1
Meditation
The Life Divine
A Love Supreme
I’m Aware of You

Disc 2
Flame-Sky
Let Us Go Into the House of the Lord

http://www.dimeadozen.org/torrents-details.php?id=265710

Welcome to Music for the Mind!

From the Amazon.com review of "Music and the Mind" by Anthony Storr:  'British psychologist Storr argues that music originates from the human brain, promotes order within the mind, exalts life and gives it meaning.' Well, yeah.  I cannot imagine life without music, it's just such an integral part of my life.  For me I use it as an enhancement of my surroundings (listening to "Bitches Brew" while sailing past Kilauea at night was almost a religious experience), or as a distraction from the tedium of driving, or just as way to get "out of body" for a while and escape into another place.

So this blog is just going to be about music I'm currently enjoying, be it a new release or an old gem I may have recently discovered or re-discovered.  I've got pretty diverse tastes in music, so things will be ranging from jazz & fusion to progressive rock to electronic & ambient to who knows what.  I'll also blog about concert recordings I've come across on any of the bit torrent sites I frequent as this is the way I usually find new music - there are a number of artists I found out about from a concert I downloaded via bit-torrent and went on to purchase official releases by.  From time to time I may get into the technical side of things, such as headphones or music devices, but one thing I'm to stay away from is politics.  I've got strong political opinions but music is about bring people together, so in that spirit I'm going to stay away from a topic that can be so divisive these days.

Onward and upward!