Once again the furthest away from another sampler. This is my second day into an actual CD case, a sort of make-believe apple crate that has been shaped into a single row to hold CDs. I collected as many of the wooden cases for holding CDs that I could come across in the attempt to pretend I was organizing them. It's also how I was able to make estimates as to how many CDs I have. Now I have a lot of beat up wooden racks that I drag around with the CDs and none of it is organized.
Miles Davis On the Corner
Miles Davis continues to add to his lead as most represented artist in the Albatross. This time with one of his early fusion experiments. Not as 'grindy' as Bitches Brew, this one is a little more funk oriented. Not satisfied with having one fusion pioneer with him, the album has both Herbie Hancock and Chick Corea. And a bunch of other people that became prominent in the new fusion jazz. Because if you're in Miles' band, that kind of means something.
I know that I have two of this album because I know I've listened to it before but this one was unopened. I think it might have been a double set of On the Corner and Big Fun that I had, now that I think of it.
On the Corner might be that turning point, the sort of 'missing link' I've had with Miles Davis' fusion efforts where I've never been able to connect albums like Bitches Brew and Live/Evil to Tutu. On this album Miles discovered looping, over-dubbing, and using multiple tape machines. This is a kind of 'layered cake' recording that could be argued is anathema to jazz if one considered the interplay of the performers to be an essential element. In contrast, though, even in 'straight jazz' engineers had been stitching together solos and the like for a while. If Miles were to craft the texture over which he would select his soloists, whose to say that you can't do it that way?
While the tracks (four in total going for a little over fifty minutes) are long and have a tendency wander, this is still more accesible by bounds than the previous, more caustic fusion experiments. Which is not to say that there isn't some stuff on here that will make whoever else is listening ask you, "What the hell are you listening to?" (wah wah sitar...you heard me...)
This is about as far from the last Miles Davis that went in to the Albatross.
Even if it's fusion I'm still weirded out by the fade out.
Wayne Wallace
Three in One
Alright, so now I feel completely stupid scoffing at the notion of 'Cubop' and thinking it was made up for the first CD I came across that had it. I officially feel humbled and ridiculous in light of the fact that I apparently have been sitting on a small goldmine of cubop. I'm sorry. Can the Albatross stop mocking me now?
He's holding three trombones on the cover, so I was afraid that 'three in one' might be like the 'What More Flutes 4' thing where he just used three different trombones (well, bass trombone is pretty awesome...), but instead its a general philosophy "general representation of the African musical continuum through US and Caribbean." According to the liner notes, that is.
And Wallace doesn't leave you guessing what three elements he might have used on any particular track, on the back they're all labeled (including Cubop...).
This guy might have been my instructor had I not become obsessed with going to a UC. He's an instructor at CSU San Francisco where I had initially thought about double majoring in music and film. But instead I went to UC Santa Cruz. I liked the mascot...
I don't know what is about certain CDs or certain music, but every now and then I feel like I should be listening to it live in a beer garden. Not that I spend a lot of time in beer gardens, nor do they usually have music that would appear in the Albatross...but I get the impression anyway. This is one of those CDs.
I'm going to hurt myself. It's going to happen, I complain about it happening every time and every time I do it. And I'm perpetuating it again, today, with today's choices. Though this time it's going to manifest itself as an impossibly long post in the next few days. Because I'm a deer in the headlights apparently.
This I believe puts Miles Davis in the lead as the most directly represented artist in the Albatross. There was of course that rash of Duke Ellington tributes, but only two of those were actually Duke Ellington.
So, from what I can gather from the liner notes this is a recording thought lost from a time when Miles was a trumpet player in Billy Eckstine's band. Eckstine's band also included such talents as Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. This is a small unit recording from the larger band. How this makes it a Miles Davis recording is a little dubious. Certainly Miles Davis is in the band and featured (even if it's a young Miles, how can you not feature him?), but these aren't his tunes and from the rather confusing liner notes there doesn't seem to be an indication that Miles led the session. I suspect that someone rightfully assumed that the CD would be a much larger success as a Miles Davis recording than a Billy Eckstine recording. In fact, the liner notes go into great detail about how Eckstine's band was a 'musicians band' that never got the audience it deserved, largely due to poor recordings. And, apparently, Eckstine isn't on this recording, instead it's Earl Coleman. That might be another reason to not call it an Eckstine recording.
So this recording, this release actually, is for me. It's for the 'jazz historian' who wants that sample of early (20 years old at the time of the recording) Miles Davis, just after some sessions with Parker, a Miles in mid-development. Thus the completely listener unfriendly set up of the tracks. Each song gets anywhere from two to four 'takes,' all laid back to back so you can listen to the same song four different times, which is fantastic if you want to listen and compare the subtle differences between each performance, how the artist adapted and developed his approach during the session. Real jazz nerd stuff.
However, if you just want to listen to some Miles you might think that you accidentally putting the player on repeat. Sometimes you can get away with it in jazz, people won't notice that they've listened to the same song twice, or have been listening to the same song for half an hour. But these have lyrics, and that can throw the whole thing into focus.
And not only that, if you picked this up to get some Miles Davis it's like picking up a bunch of rough recordings of The Beatles doing Buddy Holly covers. Sure, you can hear the germ of the band that eventually recorded Rubber Soul, but it ain't Rubber Soul.
There is no information on the complete line up. I know who the singers are and who Miles is, but no idea who the saxophonist is. He sounds familiar, so I have this sinking feeling if I found out I'd be embarrassed to not know. And thanks to Google, now I know, Gene Ammons (I don't feel bad) but the drummer is Art Blakey, which is awesome.
Of course this puts Don't Explain to Me Baby in contention for most represented song on the hard drive with four off the same CD. Sort of unfair, but I have a feeling that it will hold at four for a really long time.
With all the repeated tracks, the album still manages to be just over half an hour long. Which is just long enough since it's the same four songs over and over again.
So I've come across another water damaged CD. This one is a sampler of traditional or 'dixieland' jazz. It seems to range from the earliest jazz, The Original Dixieland Jazz Band, to Kermit Ruffins.
Where the last CD's liner notes were confusing, these are just fused together and therefore unreadable.
I've never been as into traditional jazz as other forms of jazz. Mostly because it's 'pre-saxophone' and I tend to not like the clarinet (despite the fact that one of the contenders for 'most represented' is actually a clarinet player...). I grew up to a rather large traditional jazz festival, so every spring I had plenty of traditional jazz on tap (though as I've related before, I spent most of that time listening to a Scottish jump jive band.) It might be a by-product of what I talked about yesterday, context being everything. Traditional jazz, good traditional jazz, top performers, were not in anyway a novelty to me, just something that was seasonal. So when I listen to traditional jazz I just think 'spring' and maybe being the dorkiest kid to ever cut a class to go watch jazz downtown.
Having said all that, I love second line music, the marches. I love the idea of a band just marching down the street until there is enough people in the street and turning around and having a party. That's just awesome, how can you not like that? Well, I guess if you had to get out of your house and there was some jazz band party parade blocking your way...
South Rampart Street Parade even comes with a raging marching drum solo. Not uncool.
These are all pretty clear recordings. Yeah, see, that's an electric bass on Whitle We Danced at Mardi Gras. These are not old recordings.
Maryland My Maryland sounds suspiciously like O Tannenbaum...and sure enough, it is.
Also, fantastic first line of a song, "I ain't gonna give you none of my jelly roll..." Awesome.
Ultimately, even when it's sad, traditional jazz music and related forms are 'feel good' music. It's hard to be in a bad mood when listening to it.
Today is a return for both artists and possibly the biggest challenge as far as finding something to write about. In the first one I think I exhausted my stories about him and the second one it's one of the best reviewed CDs in jazz, anything I say is going to be ridiculous.
Charlie Hunter/Leon Parker Duo
Another day, another Blue Note CD. I was going to suggest for a second there that I get Blue Note to sponsor this blog, but really they already have by supplying all of these CDs.
As I stated last time that Charlie Hunter came up that I was always a bit more of a fan of his saxophonist than I was of Charlie Hunter, and this album doesn't have any saxophone on it. This is exactly as advertised, a duo of guitar and percussion. With Hunter's characteristic multi-layer playing (something I first became aware of with the 'double tap' playing of Stanley Jordan), the drummer/guitar combo is a little more filled out than it would seem.
Hunter tries to give his guitar a 'synthesizer' sound, so it tends to give me a smooth jazz vibe when listening to it. Still has a pretty good groove to it if my bobbing head is any indicator.
I'm only in the intro of the song so far, but he's giving a pretty cool 'spy movie' feel to the standard You Don't Know What Love Is. This is a smokey version to stand next to Billie Holiday's, really. It wouldn't be out of place in a Quentin Tarantino soundtrack, either, with the low sustained string bass and reverb heavy lead, it has that kind of surf flavor that pops up now and then on his soundtracks. That really was kind of awesome. Relatively short, for a jazz number.
That's true for a lot of the tracks on this album. It's ten in total coming to just under forty-five minutes.
There's a Beach Boys song on here, too, but you'd have to strain to recognize it.
I honestly remember getting this CD and kind of not caring. It wasn't the full group, I wasn't as into Hunter as I was the people he played with, the first track wasn't that dynamic. I just gave it a pass. Now that I listen to this, I was wrong, this is actually pretty cool.
"Duo" albums are pretty common in jazz, especially on Blue Note. The idea is either to legitimize a lesser known player or to hope that there is a multiplier effect of putting together two well known artists in an 'event' style performance. This usually means that I get some awesome hyperbolic liner notes ensuring that me that this was a pairing of the gods, that the universe had focused its energies to create a near perfect moment in jazz. But no such luck, it's really just simple credits. Which is too bad because I really would like to know the story behind Calypso for Grandma. Whatever the story is, the song is pretty peppy. And allows for the biggest moment for Parker to cut loose.
Miles Davis Kind of Blue
It's one of the most iconic albums in jazz. It has what could most accurately be described as a 'super group' as its line up with Miles Davis, Cannonball Adderly, Paul Chambers, Bill Evans John Coltrane...every track is recognizable even to people who may not listen to jazz (especially if they listen to NPR, likely they've heard at least a few of these tracks used as bumpers.) Google "top ten jazz albums of all time" and you'll find Kind of Blue on just about every list at or near the top.
If you don't own this album, you kind of suck.
This is, I think, my third or fourth copy. I had it on vinyl which was thrown away with my comic book collection (frustrating...). Then I lost the first two CDs and more or less assumed that I had lost this one. It's one of the few albums where I know almost every note. While I was typing I found myself humming along to Adderly's solo in So What? I knew that the BART ride to work was exactly as long as All Blues. I haven't listened to this album in years, but in the years I did listen to it, I listened to it a lot.
The trivia that you can find anywhere on the internet: It's an all 'modal' album rather than using complex key changes and chord structures. The group didn't know what they were going to record until they showed up to record it, they had an idea, but the charts weren't presented to them until the day of.
One of the greatest elements of this album is its complete simplicity and openness. This isn't the bombastic bop or deep grooved hard-bop of the time, or the chaotic avante-garde that member John Coltrane would later go on to play. This is an open canvas style music, which works great when the players you give that canvas to are legends. It was this kind of open experimentation that eventually led to Cool Jazz, which Miles Davis pioneered.
I was going to contrast it with the other albums that came out that year, but instead I'm finding out that it was the best year ever. Time Out, Duke Ellington's score to Anatomy of a Murder, Mingus Ah Hum,Portrait in Jazz, Shape of Jazz to Come, Giant Steps...all in one year. Holy crap. These are some of my favorite albums and also a pretty good representation of those 'greatest jazz album' lists. What was in the water that year? To underline how bad ass this group is, on that list is albums by two of the band members, Portraits in Jazz by Bill Evans and the absolutely legendary Giant Steps by John Coltrane. Incidently, Coltrane tried that whole Miles Davis thing of just giving everyone the music the day of the session, except he gave them the most challenging set of changes in jazz resulting in in Cedar Walton nearly trainwrecking during his piano solo. No one holds it against him.
Whats more is each one of those albums represents a landmark in a new and separate direction in jazz. If you were to look at the development of jazz as a tree, this would be where the tree shoots off into a bunch of separate branches.
So this is the thirty-first day. I've been actually doing this for a month. The time period is longer because of the hiatus, but thirty one actual days of cds going onto the hard drive. I don't really have anything profound to say about it but that I'm rather enjoying doing it.
It's all jazz day on the 31st day, and all jazz that I tend to prefer, so it's an easy day for listening because I'm likely to enjoy the heck out of it. We'll see if that translates. I was also suckered again by CDs in sleeves, but this time it's only going to result in three hours of music instead of yesterday's marathon five. When I originally decided to do this, five was the first number I came up with until I realized that five CDs a day meant listening to five hours of music straight through every day and write about it while it happens. It doesn't sound horrible, I'm sure critics do it, and just listening to music that long is not bad at all. But having to comment on it, and my decision to wear headphones to give the music it's best (under the circumstances) representation, that clearly would have been too much. And besides, critics get paid to do this, and I don't know that this blog has a reader I haven't met, so two it is.
Except today, where it's three.
Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers At the Cafe Bohemia V.2
This has always stood out to me as the halmark of post bop jazz. Not this particular album, which I apparently didn't even take out of its case until just now, but The Jazz Messengers in general. I may have mentioned this when I did the Tony Williams Trio, but drummers make the best bands, and the biggest proof of that is Art Blakey and his messengers. The jazz critic written liner notes tell me that this is the original line up (as much as I admire the Jazz Messengers, I don't really know the line up history--I just know that any time I pick up a Messengers CD the line up is going to be awesome.) The Messengers went from this super band line up to be the greatest predictor of remarkable talent until Blakey hung up his sticks.
This is not a volume two in the box set sense, but it is a companion recording to another that I'm hoping comes up because it's got some of my favorite Horace Silver numbers on it, apparently. It's of course another Rudy Van Gelder edition...I wonder if I should have been tagging those all this time?
I have been sitting on my Art Blakey anecdote, and I don't think I've already blown it. I wanted to use it yesterday when it was probably a little more appropriate. I was backstage at a Terrance Blanchard performance at Yoshi's in Oakland--I don't remember if I got back there because of the record store or because a former record store employee had become artist liaison for Yoshi's--anyway, I was sitting backstage while Blanchard held court. He was talking about his days as a Messenger and playing with Art Blakey. He was part of that crowd I talked about yesterday, the musicians that came out of school jazz, the technicians. He even talked about how they (including himself) loved to flex their skill by creating complicated, difficult, technical pieces. They'd all come in, Blanchard explained, with these hard, technical pieces to try out. But they'd get three or four bars in and Blakey would wave them off. "What is this?" Blanchard quoted, doing his best raspy Art Blakey voice, "Look here, anyone can write something no one can play. It takes talent to write something people want to hear." Blanchard explained that it changed his entire approach to music. To be fair, this is in no way an admission that Blanchard rejected his academic, technical past. He had reached a point of training himself, of study, that all of that was completely on demand. He wouldn't have been the player he is without that command. It just signaled a time to develop a different direction built on that philosophy.
That story effected me pretty deeply as well, even if I didn't continue on in music.
The CD opens with a track that threw me off completely, and the internet didn't help at all. The liner notes cleared it up, the track that sounded an awefull lot like Tenor Madness but was labeled Sportin' Crowd was in fact what Tenor Madness...when it was recorded six months later by Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane. And when a young Walrus played the snot out of it in high school. I had not sufficiently understood how chord changes related to each other for far too long, so I jumped at any chance to play the blues progression.
There's a weird thing that happens at the end of I Waited for You. At the end of the nine minute track the band launches into another tune for 15 to 20 seconds until it fades out. It's a weird choice.
Various Artists 32 Jazz Sampler
This is the kind of thing that I could only get from working at the store. I don't think it's the first of its kind I've done, because that seems familiar. I don't even think that this is the first one from 32 Jazz now that I think about it. Maybe not, my posts aren't as searchable as I'd like them to be...probably my fault.
This is a collection of 32 Jazz's hard bop/post bop artists, for the most part. This was a sampler of upcoming re-issues. Sometimes this meant that I was about to get six new awesome re-issues, sometimes it meant that this was all I was going to get. Since the Albatross is completely unorganized I have no idea which one is the case here. I don't know that I've seen these albums at any point, but that doesn't necessarily mean anything.
The second track on this album is one of those Real Book charts I never really got the hang of, Freedom Jazz Dance performed here by Eddie Harris. Turns out I wasn't that far off, it's just that kind of melody, I just never listened to it with a rhythm section. Or maybe I did and never made the connection.
You know, one of the things I'm discovering about myself through all of this is that I am a way bigger fan of hard bop that I thought I was. I liked it when I was learning jazz because it was funky, not as hard to play as bop and not, in my teenage estimation, as corny as swing. But my impression of it was that it wasn't always as funky as I thought it was, but that really seems false. Or I've grown into it, or something. Because of the 'straight jazz' CDs that have gone in, I've really enjoyed the hard bop ones most consistently. Rather than trying to use my own words to define hard bop, since it only seems appropriate at this point, I'm going to link to a definition.
It might be that any song named Feels So Good is going to be pretty cool. Mose Allison gives a groovy, laid back, very different Feels So Good than Chuck Mangione.
It was only a matter of time before Satin Doll came up. I had invoked it as the 'generic standard' enough times that here it is. It's being done by Raashand Roland Kirk, who sounds like he has a few saxophones in his mouth. I'm being literal here, Kirk would occasionally play multiple saxophones at the same time.
This is also a much different Angel Eyes than I am used to. A little groovier. This one is performed by Hank Crawford, not the high school big band favorite of any band that had a really good lead alto. I should explain that, but that's really it--there is a ballad called Angel Eyes that about three or four jazz bands would do at every competition that's lead by the first alto. I was expecting that song, but it was apparently a different Angel Eyes.
I really hope these albums pop up in the collection. I only managed to find MP3 downloads of two of the albums on Amazon, but they're both good.
Miles Davis Blue Miles
I'm pretty sure I have this twice, but the other one may not have survived. This is a themed compilation of Miles Davis recordings that, at least according to the CD, try to establish him as the "King of the Blue Hours between midnight and dawn." Apparently to refute him being the prince of darkness, which I've never heard him called, though he did record a song called that. Not sure that really counts.
This is the Round Midnight I'm most familiar with, the version from the movie of the same name the second most. This is probably the version of Round Midnight that everyone is most familiar with, even if they don't know they know it.
Miles Davis was really, really good at ballads. I mean, he was really good at trumpet in general, but he really smoked ballads. He's famous for saying, "You know why I quit playing ballads? Cause I love playing ballads." I guess there's a couple ways to take that, I don't know what he said after or before that. Certainly Miles wasn't one to wallow in a comfort zone to be sure.
I usually don't like compilations, I prefer to hear the whole album. I want that artist's 'moment', so to speak, their complete thought. I would hear people complaining about having to buy a whole album for one song and I would think, "Man, listen to better music." But I guess there is an argument to be had for, "I just want to sit back and relax to some mellow, smokey Miles Davis music."
Or, I guess, if I was trying to seduce a classy lady in a cliched movie in the roll of pretentious douchebag. I do feel like I should be sipping wine instead of water for this. Though now any water I consume makes me a little nervous if the computer is anywhere near it...
Day Seven...I've made it an entire week and The Albatross has done a pretty decent job of portraying itself.
It's started Day Seven with cruelty...the promise was the Dirty Dozen Brass Band's Voodoo, one of my all time favorite bands and one of my all time favorite albums from them. This would have been a lengthy diatribe about how ridiculous it is that the Dozen wouldn't be uploaded immediately except that The Albatross didn't allow for that selectivity when I abused student loans to get my Mac.
But instead it's about the tragedy that Voodoo still won't be uploaded onto my iTunes, because it's an empty nest.
The next is a fatal flaw AND a mystery CD all in one. The Secret Sessions, from what I can make out on the back of the cover, is a recording of previously unreleased recordings from some sort of 'super band' gathering of Corky Laing, Ian Hunter, Felix Pappalardi, Mick Ronson, Leslie West, John Sebastian, and Todd Rundgren, with Eric Clapton and Dickey Betts.
I'm not into any of these people (or know who most of them are), so I don't know why I have this. It's possible I grabbed it because I liked the idea of a secret 'all-star' session and what that might turn up. I'll never know, however, because the CD is split in several places. I may or may not have stepped on it a few times thinking it was just a case and not the CD itself.
After the disappointment of the Dirty Dozen Brass Band and the tragedy of The Secret Sessions, I wasn't about to let the next CD slip through my fingers. Fused to the liner notes, I got a rag and a razor and after some touch and go moments I slid the CD in with more than a little trepidation. I'm happy to report that the CD made it. Our condolences go out to the liner notes, however. So without further ado, lets begin Day Seven:
This CD surpasses the previous champion for cost of a new CD at almost $200...even used is $7...so far, though, I have to say, worth it.
I don't really know anything about the UMO Jazz Orchestra because apparently I'm not Finnish. But, I do have Google, which translates wikipedia for me. UMO in Finnish, it seems, stands for New Music Orchestra. There were a fair amount of downloads on Amazon, just not this album, so they get around.
This seems like a modern-day big band/fusion approach to Miles Davis' early fusion works. If I wanted After Hours 4to be more Bitches Brew, UMO is here to deliver.
After a few days of short tracks, it's cool to get back into ones that have a run time of over five minutes. And all the Bitches Brew goodness is here, long modal solos, dated but still cool synthesizer sounds, spacey guitar solos, and, of course, a trumpet with a harmon mute on shoved into the microphone.
I had discovered this kind of music by accident long before I was really ready to hear it. The neighborhood I grew up in had a video store open up at one end, at a time when video rental places were new and novel. So almost every day I would bicycle down there, eat the giant Hershey's bars they had available and rent just about anything I could. This included a Headhunters era Herbie Hancock concert and a similar Miles Davis concert. I didn't get it, I didn't understand it...it was loud and quiet, funky and chaotic...I didn't know what to make of it. But I was fascinated by it, so I stored it away in my brain as I wandered through the pop music minefield of childhood until I did the long walk around jazz fusion back to this core material, now far more able to grasp what was going on. One, as a ten year old child, simply does not walk from Feels So Good to Bitches Brew.
From Miles, they don't just play music from that period; Nefertiti gets the treatment, too.
I feel bad that this almost ended up in the Fatal Flaw pile, this is a pretty rockin' CD. Fusion, if I may use a horribly abused meme, 'jumped the shark' really quick. It was a short hop from Bitches Brew, Headhunters, and Birds of Fire to Spyro Gyra, Yellowjackets, and Dave Koz (full disclosure, my brother just stumbled me an admittedly awesome YouTube video of a dude with a remote control fishing yacht with a little remote control fisherman on it that would fish, and the music was a Spyro Gyra song that I actually owned...)
If Spook! were to be my theme song, I think I'd want Calypso Frelino to be the theme of my updated remake if they were do to it in that seventies Hollywood Auteur/exploitation way. Nice, it also has a complete Chameleon-style breakdown/change up. This might be the kind of music you play if you want your car searched. This is cruising across the desert out of Bakersfield at 3am music.
This was awesome.
Roger Waters The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking
It's tempting to play a kind of 'one of these things does not belong...' bit with this. It certainly doesn't seem to line up with the rest of the albums (well, David Sanborn is on the album, he's a jazz saxophonist). Without context you might guess that this is a mystery CD, but in fact it's the first one to go through that I actually bought on purpose.
Yep, I still bought CDs, we all did. Promos weren't hand picked, and there was a smorgasbord of hand picked CDs before us every day.
Okay, great, but why Roger Waters?
The journey begins in junior high when my uncle gave me two tapes for Christmas: Judas Priest Screaming for Vengeance and Pink Floyd Dark Side of the Moon. The Judas Priest album just sounded cheesy to me. I listened to it fairly often because hey, I didn't have that much of my own music yet anyway. But it just never caught on. Pink Floyd, however, that stuck. I played the hell out of that tape. A few years later I was able to get a copy of Momentary Lapse of Reason that joined Basie and the Dirty Dozen Brass Band on that aforementioned 40w Radio Shack car stereo (with equalizer!) in the near constant loop. It had the advantage of not drawing complaints from passengers not used to the usual play list.
Fast forward to the record store...the main buyer (who again, has, or at least had, an Albatross that makes mine look like a casual collection) and the eventual manager are both really big Pink Floyd fans. Finally I'm able to feed that adolescent fascination with the band. I learn about the band, fill out my collection, trivia up, all the proper stuff. So when dumping off excess promos at a used store, I find this Roger Waters solo album on the cheap, listen to it once, and then lose it to The Albatross.
Much in the way people identify their personalities by what Beatle they are or if they're "Elvis", "Beatle", or "Rolling Stone" you can take an equal degree of someone's temperature by figuring out when they think Pink Floyd stopped being Pink Floyd. Are they still? Did they stop when Waters left the band? Or had they stopped way back when Syd Barrett had left the band?
I'm not one for listening to lyrics much, so it took me a bit to realize the importance of Waters in the band. Besides, I listened to as much of Momentary Lapse of Reason as I did to Dark Side of the Moon, and that was all I listened to for years, so I didn't know any better.
I feel like I should talk about the album itself, but what can I say about it that hasn't been said? It sounds like variations on themes from The Wall (with constant return to refrains from Mother). Not surprising, I guess, given that they were written at the same time, apparently. The spacey bits aren't as spacey without the tinkering in the background that Gilmour and Wright brought. And Mason. I don't really know how the labor was divided up, but I know that Gilmour doesn't sound as cool on his own, so those other two bring something to the table.
It's still cool, has a lot of those weird moments, like the ominous delivery of a benign line like "I asked if anyone was hungry." Or the Arabs with knives at the foot of the bed. Or the little monologues that my co-workers would occasionally recite that I didn't know. And it's certainly an all-star band. But ultimately it makes me want to hear The Wall. I guess this would be good for when The Wall is played out but you still want something a lot like it. For all my criticism that damn title track gets stuck in my head.
Oddly enough, this would be a good CD in the same situation as the previous CD. Played back to back, this would greet the morning sun as Las Vegas came into view. (I just looked up the concept of the album, apparently a real time experience of a midlife crisis where the singer contemplates adultery...I guess in my vision he decides for it?)
And with that the first week of the project comes to a close. It's certainly been interesting to me...I hope its interesting to whoever is reading this. Maybe I'll do a week in review for people who don't want to read the long daily posts.
