Monday, June 29, 2009 #

Personal [Musical] Revelation after all these years

I had an interesting revelation last week that came to mind just now when I cranked up my Zune.

All the way through High School in the early 60s and college in the late 60s I could NOT listen to music while studying. Leave that for when I get out in the working world and find myself in a 'ballroom' of people in little boxes called cubicles.

On this contract it's possibly the worst-case scenario because I'm in a small room, facing into a hard wall. The wall echoes and it's like being in a fishbowl. I can generally distinctly hear 3 conversations. Right after the latest move, I actually had someone in the cubicle to the East of me yelling over the top of my cubicle to the person in the cubicle to the West of me ... geez...

So a set of Bose Acoustic Noise Canceling Headphones (yeah those!) are my saving grace. And I pump 50 to 80 tracks of 60s jazz through them every day.

So why 60s jazz... and that gets back to the revelation ... see you thought I was losing my train of thought didn't you??

Last week the song "Gloria" popped in my head, so I went to the Zune marketplace and went looking. I couldn't remember who did it. I just remember it. I ended up pulling down a bunch of Doors and then came across something like  "Biggest Rock Hits of the 60s" that was apparently done by DJs and I thought  hey... that might be good. I mean, that's the music that was playing when I first started making money standing behind a guitar... that's my roots, so to speak!

Dang... I didn't realize until it started that it was 261 tracks of music. Holy cow... I tried listening to that the next day and that's when I got the revelation... I realized why I'm a Jazz Guitarist and why I stopped listening to the radio for a while back then. What a bunch of crap that was... Most of the Doors albums sounded like they were done in someone's garage, and the rest of this stuff was either by artists I chose not to listen to or had never heard of in my life because they came and went while I was jamming out with Herb Ellis, Joe Pass, Charlie Christian, Howard Roberts, Tony Motolla, Grant Green, Kenny Burrel, Jimmy Smith, etc.

So when I think of the music of my High School years and early college ... it really is the stuff by those guys ... the Jazz greats of that era, not the popular 'top 40' stuff.

Personally I prefer to listen to music that challenges me to be better. I don't get that while my ears are bleeding :)

So that night I nuked 330 tracks off the Zune. I kept a few things, and a couple things I actually had already on CDs I own that were on there, so I'm not a total 60s rock luddite... I just like my music to be something I can listen to without being in an altered state :)

Here's to 60s Jazz... currently listening to Jimmy Smith on the Hammond B-3... very cool!

  • Share This Post:
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Share on Technorati

Posted On Monday, June 29, 2009 10:55 AM | Feedback (0)

Copyright © TehGrumpyCoder

Design by Bartosz Brzezinski

Design by Phil Haack Based On A Design By Bartosz Brzezinski