I frequently drive by the Colfax Avenue concert venues, old theaters like the Bluebird, and see names of bands on the marquee. I don't know most of them, but I read the names, anyway. When I think about going to a concert I start thinking about the volume, the crowds, and the fact that I'd rather be home anyway. The music I grew up with was all classic rock, folk, folk-rock, Beatles and Stones and San Francisco and top 40 from the 50's forward. And there was James Brown on my list as well. My father loved jazz from the swing era and played stride piano with ease. He gave me an ear for jazz but I took to Thelonius Monk and Bill Evans, who were more modern at the time. Since I was trained for years as a classical musician I've got all of that music in my head as well. I'm hardly alone in that and as I've gotten older more and more young musicians experience music in that sort of eclectic way. One form seems to feed another and the forms are endless, especially with world music easily available.
Some think that this way of experiencing music, either as a listener or as a professional musician is a sign of some kind of cultural decline. I get where that comes from. If training is what others teach you, than that will be what you think is true. I was told endlessly that I was supposed to like and play certain kinds of music, all of it European. All I can say is, it didn't take.
So to the newer stuff, at least to me. The music sound track from the film Amelie by Yann Tierson was really interesting. I even liked Eddie Veder's soundtrack for Into the Wilderness. Apparently there were others who found it, well, distracting. Paul Simon's new album, which I've only heard in small segments, seems fresh and interesting. I saw Coldplay doing Fix It on a cable TV concert the other day and was drawn in completely. Their post-modern angst was almost mesmerizing, as if they've absorbed too early the pain of the world and want to release it back to the world again in a catharsis of rhythm, melancholic lyricism and fanatical physical energy. It was pretty cool.
The sort of improvising on the piano I do these days borrows from Brad Mehldau, a kind of expressionist jazz pianist when he's letting go. He's found a way in to the pop sound world and recycles it through through the acoustic grand piano, still a powerful medium. He's got a left hand that plays a little like Bach and a little like Chopin and sometimes like Scriabin, with some Bud Powell thrown in along the way. I love his music, especially when he stretches out of bounds and goes who knows where. I suppose he's got his own version of post-modern expressionistic angst going, but that's not all he does. He's a bit like Keith Jarrett but thankfully he doesn't scream like Jerry Lewis in heat when he plays. Sorry Keith.
But the latest music that I've liked is from Finland, a piano concerto with wonderful harmonic sonorities and virtuosic piano writing. The composer's name is Einojuhani and the piece is his Piano Concerto # 3 played by Vladimir Ashkenazy. It's consistently good throughout all three movements, one of the better modern classical works I've ever heard.
You never know when something new will grab you and this one got to me, a random visit to the library and there it was. I never would have found it on iTunes or Pandora or anywhere in cyber-media. It was sitting in a bin, just like the old days before Tower Records went under with all the other CD stores. Thankfully there are some bins left to cull and consider.
