Baby playlist

Way incomplete; writing preempted by baby.

"Ripple" (from American Beauty) This was a sing-along at Hilary's little sister's Quaker high school graduation. I was shocked that so many people knew the words, and still am. It's not just that they're nonsense—some nonsense is learnable—some basic deep-language glue is missing, and even after dozens of spins I can't guess what word might occur next. Amazing melody, though, and astonishing synergies in the arrangement. Happy to lay down some neural pathways with this one.

"Vermont/Tokyo Counterpoint" (Steve Reich composition for MIDI marimba = reading rainbows) Seized by the thought that I might perish on the fifteen-hour drive from my parents' house back to Pittsburgh, I made a tape of this piece for my brothers. I had heard it only once or twice, but felt it was kind of a map of me, and was I feeling emotional about possibly dying on the highway. Listening now through baby ears, I am impressed by how light and fun this music is. In general, Reich is on our autism-watch blacklist, but this piece is unencumbered by rule-mindedness; it changes not according to a formula of permutation, but in order to follow its joy.

"Ocean Bowls" (Karma Moffett; a recording of crashing waves, accompanied by assorted notes played on Tibetan bowls, a geographical non-sequitur whose incoherence and ahistoricity are, I guess, par for the course) Let me begin by saying that new-age music scares the willies out of me; what it does to the brain is manipulative and drug-like and all the more insidious for the way that it shoves aside whatever's musical about music and attempts to act directly on the brain. I had some credit at the yoga store and wanted to get something like the waves track on Hilary's guided-meditation CD. Relaxing, but maybe not in a good way.

The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book II (performed by Keith Jarrett on harpsichord) It cannot be said of Keith Jarrett that "he makes it sound easy." (Only the clavier is well-tempered.) Which of these pieces had I loved years ago? I found this music extremely anxiety-producing and shut it off. However, an LP of Bach's Oboe Concertos that was a pre-natal favorite still gets lots of play. The double-reed family poses a formidable challenge to my many vows not to overparent.

"Jive Talkin'" (Bee Gees) This song was formerly known to me only as scary drug music from a Paper Rad DVD, so I was shocked to hear it on the radio the other night (it's the occasional payoff like this that keeps me hooked on Rock Radio Roulette). "Jive Talkin'" is pretty amazing as a Stevie Wonder forgery; I think the beat is a direct lift from "Superstition." Although thoroughly intoxicating for me, Tessa was unimpressed; babies seem to have a built-in bullshit detector. I owe the Brothers Gibb 99¢.

I had an amazing wrong-key/flipped-beat/out-of-context hearing experience yesterday as the radio morphed out of dream-protoplasm into the solo from "Everybody Wants Some!!", my favorite passage in all of Van Halen: a simple melody, then that melody an octave higher. Whether or not you like them, I think we can agree that Van Halen has no musical peers; they outclass all. I also think they represent the pinnacle of modernism in rock music, though this thesis, I have found, does not have universal intuitive appeal. When challenged to defend this view, or at least give it some content, I could say only "seems true." Sketches of an argument that tries a little harder: novel experiences of time and space, reflecting those made possible by new technologies of media and transportation; anti-romantic, anti-sentimental detachment; primitivist incorporation of African art; futurist extension of the perceptual body; privileging of phenomena of motion and speed; populist avant-gardism; fascist fusion of athletics and aesthetics; self-identification as musical art; insistence on purity of medium; aestheticization of the alienation and aggression and mechanization inherent to urban, industrial experience; mastery as a value; genius as a value; content composed of experiences of form, with no regard for classical unities; responsibility to nothing outside the music.

Mike's Song 7/21/98

A Mike's Song jam builds on a funky F# blues vamp (it happens to be the only thing in all of Phish that Hilary says she likes), and it wraps up with a mock-heavy D-E-F# power chord sequence; because the jam has been a mostly Dorian affair, the D is kind of arresting. On this night at the Desert Sky Pavilion, Trey pauses after playing what sounds like a pretty conclusive lick, and Page, quite justifiably, hammers out the D on one of the next bar. Aside from the entrancing siren loop that's been going throughout (F#-F-E, up higher than the guitar neck goes), Trey's solo has been unspectacular, not for lack of trying, and it's clearly time to move on. Judging by the drum fill leading to the downbeat, Fish is heading to the bridge with Page. At this point, Trey could have been like "whoops" and flubbed his way into the rest of the sequence, which he does often enough. But instead he chunks out a F#m7 on two, and by three the rest of the band has fallen into place, establishing an open groove that's evenly distributed over the instruments, and they're suddenly sharing an interpretation of how it feels to roll loosely through space. But Trey's attention span is short, and he eventually leaves the group jam behind to attempt again a feat of heroism, and it's Page's stroke of genius to back up the minor shredding with a F#sus4-to-F#maj sequence, and when Trey catches on there's this absolutely transcendent (Jane's, 90's) moment where he keeps his blues riff going while grabbing the sus shit down below, "transcendent" as in you feel like you're suddenly outside of everything looking in, a spontaneous peak totally unlike Phish's standard structured climaxes—music has carried the day—and then Trey goes to the D, sealing up this seven-minute alternate universe out of Mike's that they wormholed into and at least half the band hadn't believed might exist.

Music Mountain

Wishing I could escape to Music Mountain in the Berkshires. I think I know what it looks like. I'm trying to make a painting of it, based on Hilary's description of an 80's Tanglewood poster that hung in the mud room of a friend's mom's house in Durham, NH: red oval sun, orange glow, yellow sky, and two humpy overlapping hills in undulating pastoral greens.