I’ll be honest: Mulholland Dr. is my favorite movie ever and has been for years. (My colleagues can attest to the Mulholland Dr. poster pinned inside my cubicle.) So naturally I was excited to see it at the very top of the BBC’s newly released list of the 100 Best Movies of the 21st Century (so far).
The film is filled with unforgettable moments (including that one), but the most heartbreaking and narratively significant is the one that takes place in Club Silencio. After an introduction entirely in Spanish, the singer Rebekah Del Rio takes the stage as if in some kind of trance and begins a gorgeous rendition of “Llorando” before an audience of two.
The scene may be dialogue-free, but it communicates so much—in the tears of its two main characters Betty and Rita, the way they lean on each other for comfort, their look of horror when Del Rio falls to the ground and her disembodied song continues without her. Much like Mulholland Dr. itself, the “Llorando” scene is that much more powerful for operating on a completely different plane of language and emotion than the one we use every day.
And then maybe after you’re done being devastated (it may take years), you can find this funny:
just noticed a *huge* goof in MULHOLLAND DR! in Club Silencio, the song keeps going even after the singer has CLEARLY passed out! Lol 😂🙋🏼💁🏻💀
A reader in Nashville, Holly, runs through a handful of picks:
I usually listen to something I’m going to be reviewing, or interviewing about. But when it rains, I listen to Rickie Lee Jones’ Pirates or Miles Davis’ Sketches of Spain [full album on YouTube, and its first track is embedded above]. When it needs to go into overdrive, any version—Waylon Jennings’, Emmylou Harris’, Foghat’s—of Rodney Crowell’s “I Ain’t Livin’ Long Like This,” or the very first Prince album. And when my soul’s on the line, Valerie Carter’s A Stone’s Throw Away: churchy, soulful, undulating and forlorn in phases.
(Submit a song via hello@. Track of the Day archive here. Pre-Notes archive here.)
If sidemen and backing musicians are the unsung heroes of music, and producers are the even-less sung heroes, where does that leave the engineers?
Few of the men and women who arrange microphones, sit in the booths of recording studios, twist knobs, and commit music to tape (or digital files) are known to the public. But Rudy Van Gelder’s skill and talent were such that his name rightly rose to the top echelons of jazz. Van Gelder died at 91 on Thursday, Nate Chinen reported.
Van Gelder, a trained optometrist, began recording jazz sessions at his parents’ house in Hackensack, New Jersey, as early as the 1940s. Like many of the greatest studio geniuses, RVG (as he was often known) was basically a self-taught amateur, who gradually figured out how to make what were probably the best recordings in the world. By the 1950s he was recording top-flight professionals. Sessions recorded at the house included Miles Davis’ Walkin’, Relaxin’, Workin’, and Steamin’, as well as Bags’ Groove; the Modern Jazz Quartet’s Django; Sonny Rollins’s Tenor Madness and Saxophone Colossus; and Cannonball Adderley’s Somethin’ Else.
In 1959, he moved his studio to a new, purpose-built space in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. Around the same time, he quit his day job.
From 1959 through the 1960s, RVG recorded an astonishing string of records. Many of those were for the Blue Note label, with which he was closely associated, alongside the producers Albert Lion and Francis Wolff. (Beginning in 1999, he began working on RVG Editions, a string of remastered versions of vintage Blue Note sessions he had recorded, producing canonical versions for the digital age to match the canonical versions he’d put into wax decades earlier.) But he also recorded for other labels, especially smaller ones line Prestige, and it was at Englewood Cliffs that John Coltrane cut A Love Supreme for Impulse. In the 1970s, Van Gelder recorded a series of albums for Creed Taylor’s CTI label. Many of those CTI releases have, to be generous, not stood the test of time as music, though some of them groove fiercely. Nonetheless, they sound fantastic.
Van Gelder was widely (though by no means universally) liked by musicians. He was known for being particularly warm and lifelike—a robust sound that makes the listener feel like he or she is in a three-dimensional room with the musicians, in contrast to the sound of many contemporary records, which could be brittle, flat, and trebly. An RVG record offered much of the excitement of being at a live show at a time when live recordings were generally bad. One tribute to Van Gelder was Thelonious Monk’s tune “Hackensack,” named for the original home studio and recorded there in 1954. To get a sense of the power of RVG’s sound, compare the version above to the one Monk recorded nearly a decade later with Columbia.
With Van Gelder’s passing, jazz has lost an important figure from its golden age, and one whose name perhaps appeared on more records than any of the giants of the genre—albeit in the fine print on the back of the sleeve. Though listeners may be unlikely to realize it, we shall not hear his like again.
(Submit a song via hello@. Track of the Day archive here. Pre-Notes archive here.)
A reader writes, “Speaking of video-game music, Geometry Dash is the best, because it is like an energy booster.” If you’re also unfamiliar with Geometry Dash:
It’s a 2013 mobile game and Steam game developed by Sweden-based developer Robert Topala, and published by his own company RobTop Games. It is a rhythm-based running game which currently has 20 levels. Each level features unique background music. Other features of the game include a level editor, map packs, user-created levels, secret coins, and a great variety of icons and game modes, as well as user coins and a secret vault in the latest versions.
(Submit a song via hello@. Track of the Day archive here. Pre-Notes archive here.)
When I am working on websites or doing data-related work, I like electronic music that keeps up my work pace and helps me keep on the anti-distraction blinders. Here’s a good example: “Walking with Elephants” by Ten Walls.
When I’m doing work that requires reading, I love piano music. This album by Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou is perfect for me because of its winding, elegant stumble.“Homeless Wanderer” is a great track if you need one.
This cover song doesn’t cross genres. It’s basically a folk singer with acoustic guitar covering a folk singer with acoustic guitar.
But oh my goodness, is it transformative. When Tom Paxton sang “I Can't Help But Wonder Where I’m Bound,” it was about a young man looking ahead to where his life might take him. Johnny Cash, his voice almost gone, looks back over a long life that he knows is just about over. He’s regretful and resigned and without a trace of fear, but … he can’t help but wonder where he’s bound.
I don’t know if I would really have understood it when I was young, but now that most of my life is behind me rather than ahead, it pierces me like few other songs do.
(Submit a song via hello@. Track of the Day archive here. Pre-Notes archive here.)
“Midnight” by Caravan Palace. This breaks the rules on vocals a little bit for your series, but I’ve found that the kind of vocals included in this song (more sampled / mixed in than a primary component of the song) can fade in to the background pretty easily when you’ve got it going as background music.
“I Slept With Bonhomme At The CBC” by Broken Social Scene [embedded above]. A little older than some of the selections on here, but this is a song that I’ve kept in the rotation pretty constantly since first hearing it.
“Gardyn” by Pogo. Some people might think there's a little too much going on in this song, but this is the kind of music that drives me when working ... some nice beats, pretty repetitive on the surface but complex enough on a close listening to keep the procrastination-prone part of my brain occupied.
For a panoply of Pogo songs and entrancing videos to accompany them, go here.
(Submit a song via hello@. Track of the Day archive here. Pre-Notes archive here.)
Reader Doug sends a raft of songs that he loves working to, and I’ve included his first pick here (but I’ll be culling from his long list in the coming weeks). Doug writes:
I’m always on the lookout for new music, but few things make me more excited than coming across a new artist that I've not heard before where I think “oh, damn, this is READING music.” It usually comes in bunches, because if an artist has one great reading song, it’s pretty likely they’ll have others.
Without further ado, a sampling of my favorites (or, if you run out of material ever, anyoneoftheseplaylists is pretty chock full of stuff that I will throw on in the background when working / reading):
Petit Biscuit might be my favorite recent addition to my “reading / working” playlists. “Sunset Lover” has some light vocals, but no lyrics. Great rhythm, repetitive enough that you don’t need to pay attention too closely to get the general gist, but complex enough that when you do tune in, there’s a variety of layers to unpack to really understand everything involved in the song.
(Submit a song via hello@. Track of the Day archive here. Pre-Notes archive here.)
When I am writing my novel, I love listening to Max Richter—specifically “The Twins (Prague)” on repeat. It’s a short but beautiful piece that always seems to bring out dramatic scenes from within, and onto paper.
The challenge with unorthodox instruments is that they tend to be tightly bound to a certain time and place. The clarinet dominated the swinging jazz of the 1930s, thanks to Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw, but it’s never recovered from that association. The vibraphone, with its mysterious, watery, ringing sound, might have faced a similar fate. Popularized by Lionel Hampton in the ’30s and ’40s, and brought into the bebop era by Milt Jackson, what role could it serve in the harder-edged jazz of the 1960s and beyond?
One of the two men who answered that question, and rescued the vibes from obscurity, was Bobby Hutcherson, who died Monday at 75. (Fortunately, the other guy, Gary Burton, is still going strong.) Nate Chinen writes in a New York Times obituary:
Mr. Hutcherson’s career took flight in the early 1960s, as jazz was slipping free of the complex harmonic and rhythmic designs of bebop. He was fluent in that language, but he was also one of the first to adapt his instrument to a freer postbop language, often playing chords with a pair of mallets in each hand….Mr. Hutcherson had a clear, ringing sound, but his style was luminescent and coolly fluid; more than Milt Jackson or Lionel Hampton, his major predecessors on the vibraphone, he made an art out of resonating overtones and chiming decay.
Hutcherson had a long and productive career, but he’s best remembered for his stint recording for Blue Note Records, as both a sideman and leader, in the ’60s. Hutcherson was one of a crop of players at the label who were able to shift seamlessly between greasy, gritty soul jazz and the thorny, challenging avant-garde—sometimes in the course of an album, or even within the course of a single song. Hank Shteamer flags a resolutely industrial passage on Eric Dolphy’s “Hat and Beard” (eat your heart out, Lou Reed), but Hutch could also swing right through a straightforward reading of a tune like “Django,” a showcase for his forerunner Milt Jackson with the Modern Jazz Quartet. In Hutcherson’s hands, the vibes never sounded archaic, quaint, or brittle.
Here’s “Catta,” the first track from Dialogues, his stellar first record as a leader, in 1965:
Dialogues is stacked, with trumpeter Freddie Hubbard, saxophonist Sam Rivers, the rhythm section of Joe Chambers and Richard Davis, and pianist Andrew Hill, who wrote most of the tunes. “Catta” is perhaps the most easily accessible track. It’s a rhythmic masterpiece—a Latin groove in 8/4, where Hutcherson, Hill, Chambers, and Davis, plus the horn section, are all drafted into percussive duty. Hill and Hutcherson’s feverish, interlocked playing during the vibe solo (starting around 4:10 or so) is mesmerizing.
(Submit a song via hello@. Track of the Day archive here. Pre-Notes archive here.)
A relatively obscure pick from reader Christopher:
I love listening at work to the electronic instrumental music of Dosh, a musician based in Minneapolis. His Lost Takes album is my favorite.
Embedded above is the most popular track on YouTube from Lost Takes. Christopher also points to Dosh’s Silver Face album available on Bandcamp. He adds:
Another great office listen is the amazing “Listen to Wikipedia” tool that converts Wikipedia edits to sound. It’s not music, but it’s very pleasing.
(Submit a song via hello@. Track of the Day archive here. Pre-Notes archive here.)
Reader Jay is blown away by this cover from Donny Hathaway:
This is the best live recording I have ever come across. The ecstatic screaming at the beginning lets you know that something special is going to happen. Carole King [who wrote and first performed the song] and James Taylor both perform the song admirably. However, Donny’s fever-dream delivery is otherworldly. The audience brings a supernatural energy as they half-sing, half-shout the chorus and interject with wild yelps.
This song is proof of a “higher power” at work. There is simply no rational explanation for such a transcendent performance.
(Submit a song via hello@. Track of the Day archive here. Pre-Notes archive here.)
