Thinking Allowed

*This is the sort of stuff on my mind right now largely because I amin the process of painstakingly transporting my CD collection to iTunes.  

**Random pic is a random blues band I saw at Kingston Mines in Chicago after a wedding reception.  She might not look like much...  Err... Scratch that, she might look like too much, but this chick, and her band for that matter, were amazing. When in Chicago, go to Kingston Mines. It's a sure thing.     

Faced with the potential for adding substantial quantities of music to my collection, I get a little giddy.  I'm going to see my old friends Pierre and Ted this weekend when they join me briefly in Boston before we trek up north.  There's considerable overlap between our tastes in music, if not in our collections.  These are two out of a handful of my contemporaries that I take seriously when it comes to tunes.  I think I have mentioned before that I have a tendency to be dismissive; likely coming off as an elitist more often than I'd like to admit. As Moose would put it, I'm a music snob.  

Having known Pierre and Ted since our sophomore year in college, what gets my mind spinning these days is not a sentimentality for our known shared tastes, but the potential for an introduction to some stuff that really blows me away, and the possibility that I might be able to return the favor.

It is my impression, accurate or not, that Pierre has come to inadvertently overlook older bands and musicians in favor of newer, sexier indie rock and varied other experimental types of music.  I mean not to criticize.  By comparison, I'm slow on the uptake with the newer stuff.  To use a now antiquated example, it took two solid years of browbeating for me to embrace Disco Biscuits.  This was a group browbeating effort actually, but I won't bore you with the details.  I have plenty other more pressing, more contemporary things to bore you with.

Ted's taste is a bit more like mine, though more organic.  I believe it wasn't until relatively recently that he came to fully embrace new experimental music that falls beyond the upper crust of the jam band scene, and nu jazz.  Again, this is only my impression.

Both are well-versed in the seminal experimental stuff:  Frank Zappa, Miles Davis, Mahavishnu Orchestra, Herbie Hancock, etc.   To a degree, I'm the same way, though I don't mean  to say I have a remotely detailed map and understanding of the vast networks of branches that stem from this sacred tree.  Be that as it may, I have a few things in mind.

Despite Pierre's past insistence that, while he respects them, King Crimson is a band that just doesn't do it for him, I remain focused.  I am determined to break the both of them much like they were part of the task force that broke the Disco Biscuits on me.  I can't rest until this is achieved.  I won't rest.   If you like a little craziness, and you like the Talking Heads - which in a manner of speaking are the same thing - there just isn't any conceivable reason someone could be incompatible with at least Absent Lovers and Discipline. And once on board, The Power to Believe, and Adrian Belew's Side 1, Side 2, and Side 3 aren't far off.   

Some other items I would like to pass along (forcibly if necessary):

John Zorn's Electric Masada, At the Mountains of Madness

Chick Corea's Hymn to the Seventh Galaxy

Greg Bendian's Myriad and The Mahavishnu Project

The Nels Cline Singers, Instrumentals

Battles' Mirrored

Amon Tobin, Supermodified

Keith Jarrett, The Koln Concert 

M83, Before the Dawn Heals Us

In return, I hope to be blessed with some unexpected gems of which I am completely unaware at the moment.  And maybe a little help rounding out my Disco Biscuits collection.  Lofty, especially considering that the sharing of music isn't exactly the centerpiece of the weekend.