A Lark Ascending

I'm not sure I'm ever going to eat that meal again I ate yesterday. That won't stop me going to the supermarket today to buy more food. Yes, not quite the same. But there is a pleasure in exploring new ground that is different from the pleasure of exploring the familiar. The extent of what lurks on the shelves no longer haunts me. As for the records I'll never listen to again. Well, I've not too sure which ones they are yet! I have a habit of returning to things I'd thought I'd lost complete interest in.

Yes, I like Bey too. Male jazz singers don't affect me a great deal but Andy Bey I really like.

Shirley Horn is a late love of mine...really like the time she takes to unfold things.

I love jazz vocals. When it comes to constantly returning: Norma Winstone - the vocalist who speaks to me most. Billie Holiday - just made total sense when I first started 'doing' jazz. Ella - a jazz voice that caught my ear long before I got interested in jazz.

A few of those Monkees songs are as evocative of the mid-60s for me as anything by the Beatles. Which goes to show that production line, corporate pop doesn't have to mean lack of imagination. So you want to be a rock'n roll star...

You sound like Jazz talking about The Beatles! Indeed. But I was so much older then... Actually, I owe them a pint. Forced me to listen more widely beyond rock much more quickly than I might otherwise have done.

Mary Hopkin?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-17198710 Apparently the vice-chancellor of Cambridge was seen in Muscle Shoals recently.

I hated them and everything they stood for at the time. They destroyed my musical universe! But I've rather enjoyed the main singles in recent years.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-17170897 The ultimate sell out or are they still taking the piss? Had to smile at this: "To be given the opportunity to re-evaluate the Sex Pistols catalogue is every music lover's dream," said Universal's Karen Simmonds.

I've been really smitten by Michael Tippett's Fourth Symphony in recent months. Really gripping - there's a wonderful, ghostly set of harmonies at the start that permeate the piece and haunt you afterwards. Woke up in the middle of the night to them a while back.

I wonder if a lot of the outlets for physical Naxos discs have vanished. In the dying days of UK record shops they dominated the classical racks. You'd also find them in some book shops in limited numbers - Waterstone's often had a carousel with them.

You misunderstand me! I was referring to you being ticked off by Mr. Nessa! Don't worry. He does it to all of us. I've been exploring that series myself over the past year. Can't claim to have internalised it but I've liked what I've heard including that disc. I was watching the first DVD of this set last night: Wagner > R.Strauss/Mahler > Schoenberg/Berg/Webern. Shows its age and limited production values and tells a tale that is pretty familiar. But what I found interesting was hearing his illustrations at the piano of tone rows and serialism. The sort of thing that, as I have no musical training, book accounts have only vaguely got across.

mp3s??????????????????????!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Thanks for all the positive contributions. It's not for me to dictate but this thread probably works best with mentions of single works or discs with a few reasons why. That tends to be the thing that grabs my interest and gets me exploring (not getting at you starthrower! I see you've already been ticked off!). I've been enjoying this which I've had a while: Hard to describe; definitely contemporary but with a clear sense of harmony. Has that fresh, crystalline, see-through feel that I like in Britten.

23 new releases in February. Still £4.99 downloaded from classics online. If there aren't many tracks you can get them much cheaper via e-music. A 4 track Bruckner 3 is £1.68 from there. Naxos packaging is usually pretty minimalist (though they have done some fancy slipcases). I'd imagine the rising price in the shops is just general inflation.

'Authenticity' is a quagmire. It oversimplifies the diversity of response within any community. Causes no end of silliness in folk music academia. An organ trio playing soul-jazz and a collective playing free jazz strike me as just different expressions with equal validity. Not everyone's going to like both (though some will!). Of course, in the white heat of the 60s it very much did matter 'which side you were on'.

Oh, I don't think anyone's questioning the wisdom of reading what he has to say. I'd merely suggest that he has very, very 'strong opinions' (it's a long time since I read the book so I'm working off vague memory). And, in my experience, people who promote one cause by denigrating another tend to be working from an ideology which they then make the facts fit. Given the turbulent times he was living in, that's hardly unexpected. We don't live in those times (though many of the issues remain unresolved) and can thus be a bit more detached about things he felt the need to man the barricades over. It's just a case of reading the past with caution and an awareness of wider context. I respect Richard Wagner intellectually - doesn't mean I accept a lot of what he argued in his polemics.

Back in the late 19thC there were (not quite) armed camps, facing off over the music of Brahms and Wagner/Liszt. Today we happily listen to both (well, I can do without Liszt). The ideology has gone cold, the music remains. Doesn't stop it being interesting to find out why passions ran so high then. Which is what the original question seems to be about.

Now's the time! Or was it?

Indeed. That was then, this is now.

Probably for the same reason that Malcolm X and the later Black Power movement could be so hostile to the more moderate civil rights groups (or in other eras, why the Bolsheviks were hostile to the Mensheviks or the Jacobins to the Girondins). It was not moving the revolution forward fast enough (if at all).

Which is why one can read as many books by Hugues Panassié as one sees fit to and STILL enjoy both bebop and white swing. :g Or the diktats of the post-1980 jazz neo-classicists and still enjoy jazz-rock, free jazz and...shock horror...jazz albums made by Norwegians on ECM!

Always worth remembering that it's a critical construction projected onto the music. Interesting as academic debate. But it shouldn't make anyone feel guilty about enjoying hard bop. Unless you feel a need to be in his gang. The point about the context in which he was writing mentioned several times above is important. 60 years ago a certain group of historians staked their academic reputations on the idea that the English Civil War was caused by the rising gentry challenging the aristocracy (the 'bourgeois revolution' of Marxist dogma). Doesn't look anything like as clear cut today. Though that's a construction too!