teabowl

I’m sure everyone else knows about this already, but I’m so delighted that I just had to ‘report’ on it anyway :)

Starbucks Canada is offering 2 hours of free wireless on their Bell Hotspots for Starbucks Card customers who have registered their Starbucks Cards. So not only do you get free soy milk and/or flavour shots if you register your Starbucks Card, but you can also spend a delightful two hours working/surfing at Starbucks if, like me today, you find yourself with an unexpected couple of hours away from your desk between meetings and don’t want to cough up the exhorbitant Bell Hotspot fees.

Apparently, Starbucks is introducing a Stabucks Rewards program this fall, and the free wireless offer will be transitioned into that - I wonder if you’ll have points to spend on wifi access?

Anyway, go get yourself a grande soy latte and some free Internet while it lasts.

Lifeline

Ben Harper & the Innocent Criminals. Virgin Records Us 2007, Audio CD, $8.29

Ben Harper plays a stylish blend of rock, reggae and old-style r’n'b, like a subtler, less flashy version of Lenny Kravitz. These are well-crafted, well-rehearsed songs, recorded in just seven days in a studio in Paris, directly to 16-track without using any digital tools. The CD sounds open, airy and spacious. It’s sort of like Ben Harper’s ‘unplugged’ album. I’ve been a Ben Harper follower for a long time; in fact, it’s a little hard for me to pick just one Ben Harper record for the desert island batch. So I’ll pick this one because I’m enjoying it right now. There’s a certain honesty in Ben Harper’s music - a lack of irony, a deep understanding of, and reflection on, the history of popular music. I think this is becoming a bit of a theme for me: high quality music, a bit ‘retro,’ that avoids irony… anyway, this is a great record that you should listen to if you can.

I don’t know why I hadn’t discovered this before. ‘Discovered’ may not be a particularly good word, actually. Of course, I knew about it. I just chose not to use it until now.

I’m talking about my MP3 player’s ‘random all’ function. It takes everything I have on it and shuffles it into a random playlist. Of course, you’d imagine that a music guy like me would use this all the time. But I don’t. I think there were two key factors that made me not use ‘random all’ previously:

1. I like albums and I think of them as the logical unity of tracks, chosen by the artist to flow in a particular way. Call me old school.
2. I don’t like jarring/weird segues in my music, and - before recently - it hadn’t occurred to me to ‘curate’ the underlying selection of albums in any way. Now that I’ve done that, ‘random all’ is interesting and smooth.

So far, I have found my player to be a good digital DJ. This goes to illustrate that it doesn’t really matter that it doesn’t know what it’s doing… its ‘programming’ is no worse than the average satellite radio station’s; in fact, I think it’s slightly better. But maybe I just think that because it’s all my own music that’s being ’spun.’

Here’s a running list of a sequence today:

• The Detroit Cobras - My Baby Loves The Secret Agent (From: Baby)
• Alejandro Escovedo - Looking for Love (From: The Boxing Mirror)
• Susheela Raman - Mahima (From: Salt Rain)
• Diana Krall - Besame Mucho (From: The Look of Love)
• Alison Krauss & Union Station - Deeper Than Crying (From: So Long So Wrong)
• Regina Spektor - 20 Years of Snow (From: Begin To Hope)
• Vashti Bunyan - Iris’s Song For Us (Version Two) (From: Just Another Diamond)
• Bill Frisell - Nature’s Symphony (From: Gone, Just Like a Train)
• Steve Earle - Hillbilly Highway (From: Guitar Town)
• Nickel Creek - Helena (From: Why Should The Fire Die?)
• Ali Farka Touré - Cousins (From: Niafunké)
• Louis Armstrong - Muggles (From: Hot Fives & Hot Sevens)
• Steve Wonder - Ribbon in the Sky (From: Steve Wonder’s Original Musiquarium)
• Rhonda Vincent - Where No Cabins Fall (From: Back Home Again)

Yes, I have wide-ranging tastes. I listen to all sorts of music. You’ll hate some of it, probably. But I can also passionately talk about why I like each genre, each album, each track. I think that good taste in music has something to do with being able to identify what’s great about any style and committing to it even when (maybe: especially when) others don’t understand. I’m passionate about being eclectic. That either makes me some sort of musical renaissance man, or just plain annoying.

Daily Lama

De-Phazz. Universal Int’l 2002, Audio CD, $9.80

De-Phazz is a revolving cast of singers and performers around German jazz/electronica producer Pit Baumgartner. For more than 10 years, De-Phazz has released an interesting and unique blend of jazz, German cabaret music, electronica, hip hop, reggae/dancehall and r’n'b. Baumgartner changes his lineup between albums, and there are very few singers who stay for more than a record or two. The music is sung mostly in English, but there are songs in German and French, too. Everything has a delightfully old-school, continental European touch: a 40s-style cabaret tune here, a 50s Brazilian-inflected German Schlager there. But there’s also some seriously funky, and not-German-at-all soul here: a track like ‘True North’ shows off Baumgartner’s production chops - chops that could grace any contemporary ‘big’ r’n'b artist’s album. The path he chooses, though, is quirkier than that. And it’s a very likable quirkiness, one I find myself returning to time and again. The sound is cultured and aware of the world’s musics in a way that British or American electronica isn’t. And that makes this first-grade pop music that doesn’t become dated.

Bookmarks for the last few days:

• How To Change Autoplay Default Setting Or Option In Windows Vista - "When connecting devices, such as USB drives or inserting a CD or DVD into Window Vista, Autoplay will display and prompt you to select a default action or setting." Here's how to change it.
• The Home of Janet Klein and her Parlor Boys - Great sounding singer of 20s-style vocal music.
• School of Etheric Healing | Home - Kathy Roseborough is the most amazing spiritual counselor/reader. Visit her if you can.

The Trouble With Humans

Chip Taylor. Megaforce 2006, Audio CD, $10.73

Staying with the theme of how country music could be, here’s a favourite record by Chip Taylor and Carrie Rodriguez. Taylor is a singer-songwriter who emerged as a writer of hit songs in the 60s (’Angel of the Morning’ and ‘Wild Thing,’ for example). Although he was born and grew up in New York, he had a strong predilection for country music from an early age, and that’s where he has now returned. Taylor met Carrie Rodriguez, an Oberlin and Berklee College of Music trained singer/songwriter/fiddler, during an in-store performance she gave at the South by Southwest Music Festival in 2001. The two now perform as a duo. Four albums and an EP into their journey together, their music is a low-key, intelligent kind of country/folk - not entirely dissimilar to, say, the Texas singer/songwriter Townes van Zandt. Anchored by Taylor’s strong rhythm guitar and harmonica and Rodriguez’ fiddle, the songs feature insightful lyrics and a kind of “old time country” feel. They also couldn’t be further removed from the Carrie Underwoods and Jessica Simpsons that seem to pass for country music today. Taylor and Rodriguez have perfectly matching voices - hers a strong cowgirl soprano with a Texas drawl, his a refined baritone with occasional carelessly slurred syllables and frequent moments where he speaks more than he sings. The lyrics are precise and emotionally spot-on throughout - this is material that’s carefully thought out, written to be performed by these two performers, meant to showcase their unique abilities. The Trouble With Humans is a beautiful record about grown-up relationships whose words often manage to encapsulate a core truth in the simplest way possible, yet in a way that we’ve never heard before. ‘Curves and Things’ and the title track should be prescribed material in English class, they’re so good.

Wrecking Ball

Emmylou Harris. Asylum Records 1995, Audio CD, $7.50

A towering achievement and also an immensely likeable record. Emmylou Harris, after spending the first half of the 90s playing and recording solid if traditionally-oriented country albums, in 1995 teams up with Daniel Lanois and engineer Malcolm Burn to make a surprisingly experimental, electronica-influenced, slow-burning gem of a modern country record that sounds nothing - absolutely nothing - like country music sounds in 1995 (or since, for that matter). She forges a completely unique path here, presenting material in a way that boldly proposes an alternate universe: one where country music does not sound like 80s mainstream rock (or bluegrass nostalgia). Instead of commercial sheen, the music here has grit, tape hiss, low and odd keyboard pads, loops and samples… and yet, there’s Emmylou Harris’ voice, invoking a true country idiom with every line she sings. There’s much pain and sadness on this record, all of it worth hearing any number of times. A true artist statement, even though she only co-wrote one of the songs (”Waltz Across Texas Tonight,” with Rodney Crowell), Wrecking Ball is a must-have, even if you don’t like country as a rule. (As someone who was always a performer and never a writer, this album also marks the beginning of Emmylou Harris’ journey into songwriting, culminating in later records that have a similar sound but songs mostly penned by her, which are also worth listening to.)

Mozart

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (Composer). Nonesuch 1996, Audio CD, $10.94

This is a beautiful performance of Mozart’s 20th and 18th piano concertos, one of those records that changed my perception of how Mozart concertos could be played. I had grown up listening to Barenboim and Gulda playing these works (my mom’s record collection), and this is entirely in a different league. Well, ‘different league’ makes it sounds as if it somehow invalidates the other, older versions. That’s not really it. But the playing and recording quality are delightfully superior in this modern version. Goode, an American pianist, plays these concertos energetically, and with a very Viennese ‘lightness’ that seems wholly appropriate to the material. The Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, the famous ‘conductor-less’ group from New York, seems an ideal pairing for this material. I love their complete Mozart Wind Concertos, and this seems to confirm their knack for Mozart concertos. I believe this disc could get anyone excited about Mozart’s piano works. Maybe that’s a bit of wishful thinking, but do give it a try :)