the yearly roundup

Hard to believe but another year is looming large on the horizon. That means it's time for the yearly roundup of good stuff that I've encountered music-wise. And by encountered I also mean re-encountered, too. This stuff isn't necessarily particular to 2010, that's just when it happened my way.

Books

David Toop's Sinister Resonance. Toop does it again. This book is special for me because it has come along right at a time when I've been thinking about the peripheries of music and sound more generally as well as what's going on when we hear/perceive such.

Wallace Berry's Structural Functions in Music. Actually I'm not sure where I come down with this book. The author does penetrate deeply. I'd be interested if the book were about music and not just a small segment -- though maybe people could start writing appendices of sorts applying Berry to Indian music, R&B and free jazz, etc.

Recordings

Carolyn Hove, Ascending to Superlatives (yeah, I'm not thrilled about the title, either, but there it is...) Great English horn album starting off with a Castelnuovo-Tedesco piece entitled Eclogues (for English horn, flute and guitar) which is fantastic. All the works are terrific. This record will make you believe in 20th century music (if your faith has indeed ebbed). Also, though I went to CCM I had no idea the Gerhard Samuel was also a composer...

Not entirely unrelated is L'ensemble Pyramide's recording of Migot chamber works featuring flute, clarinet, harp, bassoon, etc. Great pieces! I'm a huge Migot fan and if you've never heard of him just go ahead and jump in with this one. The works are modal and very, well, French. If you dig on the likes of Poulenc and Dutilleux you'll like this one. There's a wikipedia thang about Migot here.

Gentle Giant's Octopus. My favorite prog album to date. Very diverse, excellent tunes.

Bill Emerson's Gold Plated Banjo. A good friend of mine always turns me onto what he considers the "best of", any genre. For bluegrass his pick is this one, and I have to agree. It's so filled with gladness that it'll make you happy that you're alive -- it'll at least put a big smile on your face!

The B-52s first album. I heard it when I was in 6th grade and loved it. I listened to it again about a month and a half ago and I still love it.

Other albums heard a long time ago and re-enjoyed: Vangelis' Albedo 0.39. That's right albedo, the reflectivity of an object, 1.00 being perfect, 0.39 being roughly the Earth's. V does all of the instruments and the tune Main Sequence is spot-on fusion (with even a great little blues lick near the end!). Of course the opening tune is great (Pulstar) as is the tune Alpha, both of which were in Carl Sagan's Cosmos.

Susanne Schoeppe's Ponce, Moreno, Dolezel & Castillo: Guitar Recital (yeah, technically any recording with the word "recital" in the title should entitle the maker(s) to a public torturing...pretend the album is called Diario, I guess). Susanne needs to be thanked, sincerely, for playing (and playing beautifully) Torroba's Sonata Fantasia. It's an absolutely exquisite work and hopefully will only grow in popularity.

Zombies: Odessey and Oracle.

Video

Scott Henderson: Jazz-Rock Mastery. This is really 2 videos in one: the first is about scale choices for given common chords (maj7, min7, min7b5, dom7 and altered dom7s -- Scott details playing both inside and outside); the second concerns phrasing and is really a breath of fresh air.

Various

The You Rock Guitar. I picked one up back at the beginning of November. A really fabulous midi controller. FINALLY a midi controller that has what I (we) really want: a midi out! No need for a 13 pin cable which then gets converted to midi then sent to the midi out. This is very inexpensive and easy to play. It's not a guitar, so there are some compromises: pulling off to open strings doesn't work, and the strings which are picked/plucked are all the same size which means that your hand doesn't get any clues as to where it is by string size. It has some onboard sounds but I go right into a Yamaha TX-7. The best feature: it doesn't EVER go out of tune...