Hi, Charlie!

Joan and I heard Garnet when he was in town last year; that was a powerful evening built on what I took to be a version of his standard performance set. Tonight's show, before a substantially smaller audience, was quite different; perhaps more relaxed, differently introspective, with fewer tales. Garnet's a droll story-teller, a strong and exceptional singer, a very good writer--and an formidible guitarist. He played six or eight guitars over the course of the concert; each instrument change had musical justification, rewarded different technical skills, and improved the song.

His most familiar song, Small Victory, tells about rescuing a horse whose racing career had ended well past her prime years. A new life is one victory for this pony; another victory follows as she gives birth to a foal. Garnet's always been playful with this song's rhythm, aware of the beat but not tightly bound to it. It's particularly fascinating that his voice plays the beat differently from his fingers. A technically sweet performance, both vocally and on guitar, which ornaments and enhances the song's message.

Night Drive is something else entirely. Although this song also has a lyric and a story, the guitar dominates the composition. It's an electric piece, with the rhythm and melody built on echo and harmonics as much as on Garnet's formidable picking and fingering skills. (There's an excerpt available on Garnet's site.) It starts quietly, builds a highway pulse (Night Drive indeed), and grows louder, more complex, and more interesting for ten minutes or so. The vocal portion of the song ended with a quotation from brother Stan's Northwest Passage which is not on the recorded version but certainly enhances the performance; that's perhaps the song's climax, but the guitar continues into the night for some time. By song's end the room was reverberating, Garnet was exhausted, and the crowd was exhilarated.

Then home, through the still-falling snow.

Demographics: Tonight's audience looked a lot like me--most of us appeared to be in our fifties and had probably first encountered Garnet when he was accompanying Stan in the 1970s. I'm not sure the audience makeup bodes well for singer-songwriters, but perhaps it's a Lansing-area thing.

Southern Ontario's across the river from Michigan, even for those who grew up on the west side of the state. For most of my life I routinely found Canadian coins in my change, and before the local NPR stations started overnight broadcasts my late-night radio was often CBC. The Handel harp concerto was one of Clyde's theme songs, at least in the sixties when I made a point of listening to his program. One of the neat things about Clyde's use of this theme was variation--always the same piece, but an array of recordings, each with strengths and weaknesses, all with something to appreciate. A good lesson.

Google found Gilmour's early review of Oscar Peterson's work. Except for the annoying (but probably obligatory in 1950) mention of Peterson's race, it's a good clue about why I found Gilmour's broadcasts interesting.

... when I was just a little boy, my sister Jenny Sue she was the queen of the hop...

Paul Cooper/The Nylons
One Size Fits All

I've been waiting for months for iTunes to deliver "Bop Til You Drop."  Just happened.  This song I'd give a six on a five-point scale.

When I was stationed at Fort Huachuca, the post offered bus service to Tucson every weekend. I rode those busses several times. I stayed in an older hotel, and wandered around town until I had to catch the bus back to the fort. Most of my Tucson memories, frankly, are pretty vague; the object was more to get off the post than to see the sights. I do recall spending a lot of time on the University of Arizona campus, and spent enough money on clothes that I remember doing so. At least once I took along a camera, though I seem to have taken only one photograph. I've still got, and still use, a clipboard I purchased in the UA bookstore; it's unusually well designed, and now carries a lifetime's memories. A different story, though; perhaps I'll tell it another day.

There was a bookstore/candle shop/concert space just off the campus. The place doubled as a coffeehouse (only on weekends, I think), and the house band was a folky quartet--a girl singer, her husband on guitar and harmony, a bassist (I think), and a drummer. It was the first time I'd found a drummer in a folk group, and the first time I'd ever seen a girl play a conventional drum kit. The group's repertoire was pretty standard for a coffeehouse band, except they had an unaccountable affection for Tim Buckley. For me, the attraction (besides the drummer) was the opportunity to hear "my" music.

The bookstore's name may have been Back Pocket, but I'd not stake money on that recollection. The drummer was a pretty & tanned & lanky person who answered to Twink St. Ledger, at least in my memory. Doubtless someone with better memories will stop by this journal some day, and set things straight; I'll post an update at that time.

This recollection was triggered because iTunes found Buckley's Buzzin' Fly a few minutes ago.

I used the cash I received on my twentieth birthday to buy a book--Woody Guthrie's Bound for Glory, as it happens--and the then-new Judy Collins album, Who Knows Where the Time Goes.  A few months later I was drafted; bought a second copy of Who Knows in California, then another in Nam.  I've also owned copies on other media:  Reel-to-reel tape, cassette, and (of course) compact disk.  That CD now has a twin in iTunes--thus today's rendition.  Neat.

I've nearly as many copies of Bitches Brew, for similar reasons.  Except I don't play that album nearly as often.  All this probably says something about my relationship with RIAA, or Elektra Records (Collins), or Columbia (Davis).  Or something.  Not sure what, though.

1313 unheard "songs" in iTunes, by the way.  Spending more time in meetings, and less at my desk.

[Thomas Edward] Morgan, artistic director of Ars Nova, masterfully conducted the hushed phrasings of the integrated folk influences and traditional chants of the Russian Orthodox Church. In the rich, resounding acoustics of the cathedral, the lambent songs of praise enveloped the audience in a wash of celestial sounds.

The Denver Post/via A Capella News

In January of 1982, while I was busily putting the finishing touches on my B.A. coursework, Tom Morgan was producing and directing Godspell as a for-credit academic project. I ate lunch with Tom and his crew pretty regularly, and Tom kept me up to date on the production's status. Most likely I told him about Andrew Carnegie, since the steel industry's early days were dominating my afternoons and evenings--or about Tommy Thompson, whose half-awake music-making--the course was American Folk Music--helped (en)lighten my mornings.  The need to actually finish the Carnegie paper on deadline prevented me from attending Tom's production, a decision I regretted then, and regret now.

Tom graduated a couple years after me, then moved to Colorado for grad school. He'd send an occasional note to report on his life and share what he'd heard from mutual friends.  Not sure how we lost touch, but it's probably time to renew the friendship.

While the music's very much to my taste, the prices are a little steep; at these rates, I can't imagine taking in more than one or two concerts.  And I'll be out of town for Leo Kottke's appearance, which would be my first choice.

Amazing what you can find on the web:

Macalester College had a student-run coffee house, No Exit, which lived behind the college grill in the Student Union's basement in the late '60s. It was a cozy, black-painted place with good entertainment, good sound, and decent food.  Leo, who struck me as a young white man impersonating an old drunken blues singer, played there regularly when I was a freshman and a sophomore.  (The music redeemed the act.)  I was almost certainly there the night these recordings were made by No Exit's soundman, Alan Peterman.

A few days later I dropped out, which led pretty directly to my army career.

Addition, 11/1/07: Nosing around Peterman's site, I find he's also posted a couple complete Dean Carr performances at No Exit (and others, from other Twin Cities places). I expect I heard the No Exit performances live. Worth a listen....

I was aware of CDDB already, as I'd run a number of audio apps through their paces when I bought my last PC and, well, you couldn't avoid noticing that the apps all hit on databases when you played a CD.  It was a couple years ago when I did this, though; frankly, I wasn't particularly impressed by the holes in the data, and the erratic quality of the data which was available at the time.  On the other hand, I've mostly used the PC's audio apps for listening to ballgames, so identifying ripped CDs wasn't exactly an issue.

Things have definitely improved. At this point, Gracenote's database (and the service it supports) are clearly "good enough" for a lot of purposes:  For almost any CD, CDDB knows the name of the recording, the name of each track on the recording, and the name of the artist.  That they were able to do this in a relatively short time with volunteer labor is a significant accomplishment, but that sort of story is becoming fairly common the Web so we'll not explore it further today.

Question:  Is "good enough" really good enough?  The answer probably depends on what you were hoping for.  These are things I find irritating, to one degree or another:

• Inconsistent data recording.
• Inadequate design for classical music collectors.
• Inadequate implementation in iTunes (and certainly elsewhere).

Inconsistent Data Recording

Composer and Year information is missing (or consistently mis-recorded) at least as much as it's available, and Genre information can best be described as casually recorded (just for instance, someone chose to mark Time-Life's Classic Rock series as "Alternative/Punk."  Yeah. Sure.)  "Compilation" is clearly a mystery to the usual volunteer, as is "Disk 1 of 3."

The problem really isn't the volunteers, it's that their interests and needs differ from mine.  Partly, too, it's the inconsistent (or unreadable) information provided on packaging, where design often trumps information.  Nonetheless, it's frustrating to find I need to fix about half the CDs I import, even though someone's already gone to the trouble to record the basic information.  Some instances deserve mention:

• Is the band which recorded "Groovin'" called Rascals, The Rascals, Young Rascals, or The Young Rascals?  I know how this happened, but I find them listed in the database with all four versions--without apparent regard to what they called themselves at any particular time.  At least I haven't found them as "Rascals, The"--
• Was "A Beautiful Morning" written by "Felix Cavaliere and Eddie Brigati", "Felix Cavaliere & Edward Brigati", "Cavaliere-Brigati", "F.Cavaliere/E.Brigati", "Cavaliere, Felix; Brigati, Eddie", or--well, you get the idea.  iTunes handles searches for this pretty well, but....
• Since all of my Rascals recordings are on compilations or anthologies, should the "Year" be the year "Good Lovin'" was recorded (or originally released, which may differ), the year the compilation/anthology was released on vinyl, or the year the compilation was released on CD?  We have some serious disagreements.

Gracenote knows these are issues, by the way, and has opinions about how this information should be recorded.  What they don't have is a way force volunteers to follow the guidelines, and only a weak mechanism for checking the data.  They're obviously depending on people like me to fill in the gaps; in time, that will likely work out.  At least that's Gracenote's design assumption.

More irritating than the omissions, though, are the outright errors.  I'm not talking about typographical mistakes--I'm talking about mislabelled tracks, misleading categorization, fields used very differently than designed, and other forms of bad data.  If you really don't care what it says on your MP3 player, keep your blankety-blank hands out of the data.  We don't need that kind of help.  Thanks!

Inadequate Design for Classical Music Collectors

The CDDB design assumes that all music comes on albums (a description, largely abandoned these days, which fit 78 rpm collections far better than LP disks), and that the albums are collections of largely independent songs.  This design works well for most popular releases, and works all right for single recordings, but is a very poor model for your typical classical composition.

• This design doesn't work well if the collection tells a story (think "Tommy").
• Neither does it work well if the collection explores a theme ("Bookends" fits this in one sense; Bach's "A Musical Offering" fits in another).
• It's a really poor design for a work with an overarching structure which contains several movements (Vivaldi's "Four Seasons" is an excellent example).
• The design makes no effort whatever to accomodate your quite typical classical album which contains three or four pieces of three or four movements apiece.  In no useful way does the "collection of songs" metaphor fit this example.

And then there's the issue of performers.  The guidelines say:  "It's sometimes tricky to figure out the principle artist on classical albums that often list the composer, conductor, ensemble, and/or soloist(s) on the front cover. So here's a tip: look on the spine of the CD, as this is where the publisher had to make a decision as to who to list as the primary artist. Second tip: The artist should be a performer on the recording, so you should rarely choose the composer as the artist."  Um, folks, that really doesn't cut it.  If I wanted, for instance, to list all the tracks in my collection where David Monroe plays recorder, I perhaps wouldn't want the tracks where he's "just" the conductor of the consort.  At this point, we don't have any mechanism for that sort of discrimination; indeed, we barely have any means to record the bare fact that Monroe's a participant unless he's the star participant.  Perhaps someday.

Inadequate Implementation in iTunes (and certainly elsewhere)

Apple's chosen to build an implementation which reveals just some of the CDDB fields, and doesn't take full advantage of CDDB's ability to differentiate between albums and individual tracks.  It's particularly annoying that they don't reveal Gracenote's entire categorization scheme; instead we get the dumbed-down top level which tosses all "Classical" music into one bin, and has no really appropriate container for my bluegrass, and my bluegrass gospel.

A couple final notes

• In my experience, owners of jazz recordings appear to care most about getting this right.  Classic rock recordings are generally logged poorly; baroque and classical music is widely variable (and likely to ignore the guidelines).  I no longer collect currently-popular music, for the most part, so I won't venture to comment on that; I'd be interested in other folks' observations, though.
• It's really quite surprising to me how often the entries on multiple-disk albums were entered by more than one person.

This is a valuable service, and useful as it stands; I like it and can recommend it.  There's room for improvement....

Did my part--during today's lunch break I picked up a CD of his Nine Tonight live album, which I'd previously bought when it was new (and vinyl).  Old Time Rock and Roll is one of my favorite recordings of anything, ever.  Of course I've been listening as I wrestled with Siebel this afternoon.

By the way:  If I live to be 90, I might reconstruct my vinyl record library in other media.  Or perhaps not....

Joan and I have rather different musical tastes.  Joan mainly listens to classic rock radio; while I'm fairly eclectic, my preferences for bluegrass and baroque music are choices Joan barely tolerates.  At this edge--Bob Seger, Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty, John Mellencamp--our tastes touch and we're both comfortable.  I mention this because Joan was in the audience at one of the Cobo Hall concerts taped to make the Seger album.  Wish I'd been there.