Music Monday: Old and New

This weekend, I suffered through a bout with The Omicron but this gave me a chance to sit around and listen to music while doing some layout work for The Digital Press.

There are certain tasks that require music in my world. It is hard for example to write queries in Access or do any GIS work without music. It is very difficult to transcribe notebooks without the right tunes. And it is impossible to do book layout or routine editorial tasks without music flowing into my ear holes.

Making my listening the weekend all the more sweeter was the descent of a brain fog that impaired my ability to do anything both the most routine tasks (and even those will require a pretty careful review before going forward). This brain fog, however, was a lovely filter for certain kinds of music which would at times cut through the fog or drift just behind it casting sonic shadows in my head. 

This weekend, I was also auditioning a pair of field coil speakers and trying to figure out whether I had an amplifier with right character to drive them. My tiny 3.5 watt tube amp gave me some tone and some very cool imaging, but not much oomph. My more powerful (nominally) class-D amp (with a tube stage) sounded a bit abrupt and not very mellifluous and a bit more low end oomph. More experimentation is in order, of course, and I find that the tubes provided some pretty nice sounds, but I’m not convinced this is they way my office stereo will go in the future.

I am convinced, that good music has some serious therapeutic potential. I was laying out the fifth volume of Epoiesen this weekend and between that and Omicron, Tyler Mitchell and Marshall Allen’s Dancing Shadows is a great reimagining of some of Sun Ra’s greatest tunes interspersed with some Mitchell originals. Allen’s distinctive alto saxophone still cuts through these songs with its insistent tone which is all the more remarkable considering he’s 97.

I’ve also been enjoying some Joe Henderson this weekend for a different kind of saxophone. I’ve been particularly drawn to his 1973 album Multiples. It’s at the edge of post-bop and fusion with just enough of Henderson’s hard bop roots to avoid being too far “out there.” One of my goals for the next few weeks is to explore Henderson’s late 1960s and early 1970s output. 

Finally, I had a chance to listen to some Julian Priester’s 1970s offerings. Priester spent some time with Sun Ra in the late 1960s and so perhaps he forms a useful pendent to Tyler Mitchell’s work with Marshall Allen and Priester also spent time with Herbie Hancock in the early 1970s after Joe Henderson gave way to Bennie Maupin in Hancock’s ensemble. Priester continued to play in the hard bop tradition but with some overdubs and more than a nod toward a spiritual or even ethereal sound. The album cover evokes some of the celestial and Egyptological imagery popular both with Sun Ra and any number of other jazz musicians in the 1970s, but the sound is pretty