Music to my Ears

I love music.  I have loved music since I was a kid.  I like music of all kinds, but my tastes are selective.  I don’t necessarily like a lot of the music in any genre I follow.  But still I like classical, jazz, contemporary, rock, country and folk.

I have liked classical since my teenage years when my church minister lent me albums of religious oratorios.  My taste now runs to Mozart and Beethoven, Liszt and Mendelssohn, and Rodrigo and Copeland.

I have liked jazz since I discovered it in the college music library.  My first love was Dave Brubeck and he remains a favourite.  I tend to favour the “traditional” jazz artists such as Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Chet Baker.  My son is a great jazz fan and he has introduced me over the years to a variety of jazz musicians, some of whom I like and some I don’t.  But he keeps trying.

I have liked folk music since The Weavers at Carnegie Hall record I bought myself in high school.  If you want to hear the music of the Civil Rights movement, listen to Peter Seeger’s We Shall Overcome album.  But there continues to be some great folk music today.  Listen to any artist from Cape Breton in Nova Scotia.

I learned to like rock over the years when I found that there really was some good music there.  The first evening movie I ever went to see on my own was Rock Around the Clock with Bill Haley and the Comets.  My current favourites include Paul Simon, in particular his Graceland album.

 

I have liked contemporary since we found that it is a type of music that both my wife and I could love together.  This covers such a wide area that you almost have to divide it into subdivisions.  My tastes run from Leonard Cohen to Mason Williams.  You haven’t heard about Mason Williams?  He seemed to do everything in the 1970s from compose some great music (Classical Gas, Sunflower), be a comedy writer for the Smothers Brothers TV show, to some offbeat art, such as a full sized painting of a Greyhound bus.  To illustrate his song Sunflower, he had a sky writer aircraft draw petals in the sky and then wait for the sun to come up in the middle of the drawing and taking a picture of the whole thing.

 

Most recently I have learned to love country since I discovered a lot of the later albums by Johnny Cash.  Just last year, I bought a new vinyl record of Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison.  I also thoroughly enjoy Willie Nelson, both his singing and the hundreds of songs he written for himself and other artists. 

Over the years, as music migrated from vinyl to tape to CD, I stubbornly hung on to my vinyl records.  Somewhere along the way, I acquired a fairly new turntable.  I spent some time looking for a music system that would allow me to use the turntable, but without much success.  A couple of years ago, a friend offered me an old stereo system dating from the 1990s which, lo and behold, had a turntable jack and setting.  After digging out an old stereo stand that would hold the system, I can now, once again, enjoy all those old, and some new, vinyl records.  It’s wonderful.  They have now started making new vinyl albums and I have discovered some stores that sell used and new records.

The reason that I thought of all this is because of a concert my wife and I attended last evening at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa.  This is probably the last live concert I will ever hear from one of the greatest female singers of our time, Nana Mouskouri;  she of the clear, bell-like voice and horned rim glasses.  I have enjoyed her music for many years and we have seen several of her concerts over those years.  She is, inevitably, approaching 80 years of age and has already “retired” once, in 2008.  She is billing this as her Birthday Tour, and in this vein, at the end of the concert, the audience sang Happy Birthday to her.  In every concert by her she has always been gracious, humorous and entertaining.  This concert was no exception.  I know of no other singer whose voice is so clear and melodic as hers.  When she stops recording and touring, it will be a great loss.  If you have never heard her, take the opportunity to listen to one of her recordings, particularly if it is on vinyl.  I promise you will not be disappointed.

As I write this blog, I am listening to a vinyl record of Nana Mouskouri.