- see, in the the end that previous photo just doesn't do it justice... if there is not quite the same sense of (thc-fuelled) unfettered exuberance as before - and in all probability there never will be again - still, the sheer sense of relief is extraordinarily welcome.
now, when i talked (in a comment) of "fifty hours or so" of re-immersion in the waters of braxton, i did not (of course) mean that i was listening solidly for two days. hell, even when i was stoned off my face i never went more than one night without sleep... no, i just meant that during that time, whenever i listened to music (a lot of the time, at present) it was to b's music; and it was indeed pretty intensive. anyone who was curious enough to click on all the hyperlinks will have noted the preponderance of official tcf downloads in there: to a large extent this was just a matter of convenience, these having been lumped together in one mega-playlist in my music library, but that worked out pretty well, allowing me to feed on a lot of pretty recent, fresh material and hence get very close to the source(s) of the composer's inspiration. it did lead to a lasting change, and one which has left me feeling a lot better all round: since the evening of that last post, i actually haven't got to braxton yet at all, but this is not for any reason other than the fact that i just found a particularly good online source for current albums that i can't afford to buy at the moment and would otherwise not be able to hear; all of a sudden i find myself in the aftermath of a complete u-turn, listening almost exclusively to jazz-based and/or improvised music. so, right now i am so busy listening to the likes of steve lehman, roscoe mitchell, george lewis, henry threadgill and (especially) mary halvorson that i haven't found time for any braxton... but this is just a matter of there not being enough hours in the day. (it's half-term, and that free time i was talking about before is gone, for a week... next monday, normal service shd be resumed!)
i have been really enjoying everything i've heard, and mary halvorson's albums have really got me thinking. can i back up what i said (in several places online) last year, and before: that her initial writing for quintet still sounds like trio-plus-bolted-on-horns, and that it's not till the third album that her charts for the quintet begin to sound like proper, fully-contemporary five-piece arrangements? what do i make of the latest development, the expansion into a septet? and what of the latest latest development, the release of a live album stripped back down to the faithful core trio..? it may be that i will have something concrete to say about all this fairly soon...
... meanwhile, one thing that did keep smacking me over the head during the aforementioned re-immersion is the near-omnipresence of good old comp. 23c, which i did to death at the beginning of this year, and swore i wouldn't write about again, or not for a good long while... well, apparently i don't have any choice in the matter, cos it just keeps cropping up, seemingly at every turn. thus, inevitably, i will be heading back there in my next post to try and make sense of all that. some of the treatments are very recent, and some rather less so, but how many times can life nudge me before i have to admit defeat?
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this came out within the last month or so. looks interesting...
1 comment:
something about the way i left things in the summer drove people away pretty hard. i have observed before (over the last year or so, since i have been allowing myself to keep note of such things) that the blog's page hits didn't seem to vary much according to whether or not i was posting regularly at the time. but: earlier this year, the monthly stats hit an all-time high and this time, when i *stopped* posting, the page hits plummeted.
now, since i am so cut off from my readership these days, i have little or no idea what's happening at present: since my last post, the hit count has shot up again, but apparenrly this is mainly because i have suddenly attracted the attention of a german webcrawler. and what, if anything, am i to make of THAT development..? ;-)
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