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Jazz noises:
 I don't listen to much jazz, but I like
what I know, as long as it's not boring. A good starting point
for this is anything you find from the Knitting Factory in New
York. Wow. John
Zorn is amazing (and he's also not just a jazzer). His hybrid
styles and multiple voices never lose their power. Coltrane
on the new Impulse reissues is phenonemenal, and I still love
Bird.
Free jazz is wonderful (read about it in a page
originally written up in the Beastie Boys Grand Royal magazine
by Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth, who recently played a few noise
gigs). The style of ecstatic music to be found on various
rare recordings (or more accessible Pharoah Sanders records)
can set my mind reeling. I've heard enough Peter Brötzmann
to know that free jazz is still alive and well, and his album
with his son, Caspar, is thrashy noise at its best. It helps
that William
Hooker CDs are showing up at the radio station, so I'm familiar
with his music. Lack of structure, but so much content...
Pop! Pop! Pop Music!!
 In pop, I can't get over that funky symbol
guy, Prince
Rogers Nelson, and Madonna
impresses me still, while Michael Jackson should stop writing
ballads. Random new groups appeal to me for a while or two, then
they become tedious (like Soundgarden, whose Louder Than Love
album was so damn good, and now....). On the other hand, Beck is so
weird, he stays appealing. Tom
Waits, if he can be called "pop," is pure heaven.
His lyrics are phenomenal and his music gets better with age
(both his and yours the more you hear it). Once I had listened
to Waits's early albums (and the Cowboy
Junkies and their great music), the step to Johnny
Cash's latest album was easy. In a similar vein (this isn't
pop music anymore...) I sometimes listen to 88.5
WAMU and their bluegrass and early country shows on the weekends.
World Music - International Rhythm,
Funky Danceability
 Finally, most of what I listen
to is world music, an overly broad categorization of genres from
Celtic (which annoys me) to Juju
(which I love), with the Brazilian
Tom Ze
in left field, and ellipsis arts being the best label I know
if in the genre.... I can't get enough of the freedoms and the
possibilities inherent in this genre which includes so many styles.
It's just plain FUN to listen to qawwali music by Nusrat
Fateh Ali Khan, gamelan gong from Bali, township jive by
the Mahotella Queens, music by Thomas
Mapfumo from Zimbabwe, polkas by someone like Brave
Combo, Finnish choral singing by Värttinä,
and all the other things that exist out there. Unfortunately,
most of these musicians aren't on the web, so I can't reccommend
any links to pages about them. Damn.
Something else I like about world beat
is that the collaborations between the curious and the skillful
(like Manu Dibango's latest album, or Paul
Simon, David
Byrne, or Peter
Gabriel, who don't exploit but learn) lead to the greatest
possibilities that I see in the western music world. No wonder
that the best Kronos Quartet CDs (beyond the astounding and moving
Black
Angels recording which everyone should listen to through
headphones in a dark room of sensory deprivation except for the
ears) are those that deal with non-euro aspects of music.
Read the next section (music since 1995)
here.
The pictures included in these pages
are by Juan Miro, Pablo Picasso (Guernica and Les Desmoiselles
d'Avignon), Jasper Johns, Rene Magritte, Oskar Kokoschka (the
sketch of Webern), and Wassiliy Kandinsky. I also found some
pictures of Tom Waits, Coltrane, and somebody making a drum...
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