Lush Life, John Coltrane and me

john coltrane lush life

The CD Project proceeds apace; yesterday I finished ripping all my John Coltrane CDs to Apple Lossless format. As I looked at each disc in turn, annotating the files with session notes and musician info, I found myself drawn into memories of my self-education in jazz.

Growing up I listened to nothing but classical music until I was maybe 12 years old, when I discovered the Police—angry yet mannered, literate rock. At the time I wasn’t totally comfortable with the angry part, but I latched onto the mannered part. Listening to Sting felt rebellious but safe. A big part of that, particularly in the subsequent solo records, was the jazz influence. I decided I needed to learn more about jazz, and so I started at the logical jumping off point of Branford Marsalis, who at that time was playing with Sting.

Exploring jazz through Branford—a young player who was trying to establish his own identity but who provided few direct links back to the old tradition, simply because he generally only played his own compositions or a few standards—was difficult. But I liked what I was hearing, the interplay of the horns with the drums, and decided I needed to go deeper. By this time it was 1988 or 1989 and Bono was name-checking John Coltrane and A Love Supreme on U2’s grandiosely overblown Rattle and Hum—which naturally I also loved. (I was 16. Whaddaya want?) So I went out and got a copy of the pivotal Trane album.

I wish I could say that I was immediately blown away, but the truth is it took some time. There were things about the record that I thought were cool—the chants and the blazing solos on “Resolution,” made my hair stand on end. But I didn’t really get the modal melodies and couldn’t appreciate the extended drum solos at the heart of the piece. But I kept listening.

In another year or so, I was a first year at UVA, and shoring up my insecurity and loneliness with CD shopping at Plan 9. I desperately wanted to be cool and to be listening to things that no one around me was, and so I spent a lot of time spelunking throught the jazz racks, anchored to the few artists I knew anything about, which at that point consisted of Trane and Branford (and, somehow, Thelonious Monk—but that’s another story). I had no education, didn’t have the sense to start listening to jazz radio, so I used the copy on the back of the CDs to decide which ones to take home. This brought me to the Prestige and Fantasy releases (the so called “Original Jazz Classics”), which inevitably contained review capsules on the back cover of the CD with raves or claims of “instant classic.”

And that was how I came to pick up Lush Life: it was the Coltrane Prestige recording that had the highest ratings and the most stars on the back.

I took the disc back to the dorm and started listening. My then-roommate Greg was in the room and we soon were both listening: to the tremendous blown run that begins the album and “Like Someone in Love,” to the percussive experimentation of “I Love You” and the walking bass of “Trane’s Slo Blues.” And then the title cut, introduced by Red Garland’s piano followed by perfect choruses by both Trane and Donald Byrd. Partway through Byrd’s second chorus, Greg turned to me and asked, “How do you find this stuff?”

I wish I could have told him the truth, but I think I just mumbled something about being lucky.

I went on over the next few years to discover the rest of Trane’s work and to branch out into Miles, avant garde jazz, and the great blowing sessions of the 50s. I’ll be digitizing all of it in the weeks to come, but I think that none of the tracks will be as often as the five tracks from this set. I can’t even guess how many other versions of “Lush Life” I’ve found over the years (at least not without sitting in front of my home computer, though I can think of versions by Roland Hanna, Bobby Timmons, Joe Henderson, Duke Ellington (of course), and Johnny Hartman in a subsequent date with Coltrane), but this one remains the gold standard.

Son of the beach

parallel lines: interdunal grasses filter the view of the beach from the boardwalk

Lisa and I paused from house stuff long enough on Sunday to head out to Crane Beach, and I’m really glad we did. Lisa had already visited a few times and liked it enough to become a member of the association that maintains the property. But I hadn’t been able to visit until this weekend. Compared to some of our other beach visits, this beach was an Intercontinental property: prime location, impeccable facility, and really expensive ($22 to enter without a membership).

The sand was smooth and fine, almost like talc. We set up our sun tent and basked for a little while in the 80° weather, then headed for the ocean. Which was about 58° F. I couldn’t bear to immerse my whole body, just stood knee deep with my teeth chattering, while Lisa pointed out the other amazing thing about this particular beach: the water was so clear that we could watch streams of minnows zipping past our knees in a continuous flow. It was absolutely amazing.

I didn’t get my camera out while the sun was really bright, but managed to get a few decent shots in spite of increasing cloud cover. My greatest disappointment was that I wasn’t able to capture the luminosity of the water against the cloudy sky in a photograph, though the first one in the set gives a hint of what I saw.

Warm water, with gas, despite everything.

viessmann

A few projects drew nearly to an end this past week. Most notably, the installation and activation of the new gas-fired high efficiency boiler finally brought to a close our year long experiences with oil-burning heat and hot water.

As frequent readers of this blog will recall, our experiences with oil-fired steam heat have not been rosy. After a while of this, plus the expenses of oil (even on a monthly budget), we started thinking hard about other options. When we talked to the contractor who put in our Unico system, he suggested we consider a high efficiency gas boiler in its place. We considered, we thought, and we bought. And the installation, occurring this week when gas (and oil) prices jumped almost beyond recognition, seems to have come in a timely fashion. We’ll see how the bills work out, but right now it seems like a good move.

One funny note from the installation. We had the boiler on line by 3 pm on Friday. Lisa and her family came back from the beach at 4:30, and took a few showers. We ate, and later Lisa’s father reported that the water from the kitchen sink seemed cool. In fact, it was cold. My initial investigations suggested that all was well, just not working. The contractor said he would send someone out in the morning.

The next morning, Lisa took a shower and reported delightedly that there was hot water. Shortly thereafter, the contractor knocked and asked, before, I could even say anything, “You have hot water now, don’t you?” It turns out that, as he explained to me, there were two settings that were failing us. One, a power-saving setting, was set at the factory to turn off domestic hot water production between 10 PM and 6 AM. The other? The clock, which was still apparently set on German time. By my calculations, hot water had stopped at about 4 pm, and the 50 gallon tank had run out by about 9 pm—five hours later. Not too bad, all things considered, and even better now that the clock is set to the proper time.

Trackbacks are Dead.

house of warwick: Trackbacks are Dead.. Having started a regime of checking my Trackbacks every two weeks (particularly necessary since Manila provides no notification when trackbacks are received), I would have to agree with the sentiment here.

I would also hope that, when Steve asks Jake at Userland to look at Radio’s code to provide some spamproofing in Radio’s Trackback code, that the code will migrate to Manila as well. We sorely need it.

Update on The CD Project: 108 down, about 850 to go

The Great CD Ripping Project continues, after a brief hiatus while I was out of town on business. New totals: 108 albums, 1317 songs, 4:04:52:01 total time, 28.02 GB.

I’ve had to add a few new smart playlists to keep up with The Project. I still want to listen to all the music as it comes in, but the large lossless files won’t all fit on my iPod. So I’ve had to build a small Never Played playlist, limited to 100 or so tracks, to manage. I also built a smart playlist where “kind” contains Apple Lossless so that I could easily identify all the tracks that have been ripped as part of the project, and I could easily track my progress.

I’ve also had more than one occasion to bitch about the CDDB, and more particularly, about people who mangle the data for classical CDs. One version of the rant is contained in this comment on a MacOSXHint. The hint claims to provide a good way to manage classical tracks, but instead actively encourages inaccurate data.

The worst, though, is people who use the Artist field to put the movement name and put the name of the work in the Title name. This is all over the CDDB. It’s driving me up the wall, because it’s taking me at least three times as long to rip a classical CD. I’m afraid if I import the tracks with bad data, I’ll never be able to find them to reconcile them again.

iTunes Music Store now Tougher Than Leather

Well, it took two years, but Run-DMC is finally available in the iTunes Music Store as of Tuesday.

(One) day when I was chillin’ in Kentucky Fried Chicken
Just mindin’ my business, eatin’ food and finger lickin’
This dude walked in lookin’ strange and kind of funny
Went up to the front with a menu and his money
He didn’t walk straight, kind of side to side
He asked this old lady, “Yo, yo, um…is this Kentucky Fried?”
The lady said “Yeah”, smiled and he smiled back
He gave a quarter and his order, small fries, Big Mac!
You be illin’

RIP, R. L. Burnside

Just got word from RL Burnside’s label, Fat Possum, that the late blooming blues musician passed away today in Memphis at the age of 81. Going from a hardscrabble life as a sharecropper and fisherman, he recorded for the first time in 1968 but didn’t make it into the public eye until his 1996 collaboration with the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. A great bluesman and a great voice.

Catching up; golf introduction

There’s something about business travel, even to a location with high-speed Internet, that makes it challenging to keep to a normal posting schedule. In our case here, the specific issues were:

  1. A game of golf, my first ever, played on a partly rainy day on Tuesday
  2. A bad cold that started arriving yesterday

I do not think that (b) is connected, at least not directly, to (a). I rode in a four passenger vehicle on Monday with a woman who was in the throes of a bad cold, and so far my symptoms (coughing, aching head, congestion) seem consistent with hers. Still, I’m pretty sure that the golf game didn’t help my resistance.

My first round of golf, a full 18 holes, did two things. It opened a door into a world of male competition (our foursome and our competitors were all men) that I had not previously witnessed directly, and it made me aware how out of shape I am, at least from an upper-body perspective. I think my shoulders have stopped aching. Regarding the former, I will not disclose my score. It wouldn’t be a useful number, because we played best ball off the tee (we all played to the hole from the ball that went furthest on the drive), and because we all agreed to hold our scoring to eight strokes a hole max, so as not to inhibit the progress of a game. There were a few par threes, owing to the best ball rule, where I broke that eight-stroke ceiling and actually landed the ball in the hole on five or six strokes, but the rest of my scorecard is a wall of eights.

The good news is that I have nowhere to go but up. Heh.

Funny postlude: we were discussing career paths over an after dinner drink last night, and I prefaced a statement with the clause “Having spent most of my childhood and teenage years in a library…” The presales engineer who gave me the most pointers snorted, then asked, “Really? You didn’t spend them on the golf course?” Zing.