Black, gold, and vinyl January 24, 2006
Posted by Patrick in : Music , trackbackThe weekend was a lot of fun. Friday night, I had a good time hanging out with my roommate Ken. It’s funny. Our house is so large and cold, we spend most of our time in our individual rooms when we’re home. So I can go weeks without seeing him. It was good to catch up. Not to mention, I learned that he bought both a plane ticket to Denver and a ticket to the AFC championship!
For some reason, both Friday and Saturday I visited a couple vinyl record stores in the area. The first one, Jerry’s, is one of my favorite places. It takes up the entire second floor of several storefronts in Squirrel Hill. The first few times I was there, it was amazing that every time I turned the corner, the room would open up into a whole other warehouse of music. While I was there, I picked up:
- Will the Circle Be Unbroken: a great collection of old-timey, bluegrass, country songs. I picked it out on a whim and I really enjoy it.
- Time Out: a Dave Brubeck album that I’ve heard before and liked. Does anyone recommend any jazz? I don’t know anything and I’m trying to broaden my horizons.
- My Aim is True: since buying my first Elvis Costello album (Trust) in Denver for $2 last June, I’ve been digging his music ever since.
On Saturday, I visited Attic Records in Millvale for the first time. Their store and stock were greatly damaged by 2004’s flood. It took 50 dumpsters to clear all the damaged records. Check out this picture. They had a good collection there. A bit more pricey than Jerry’s though. I thought I struck gold when I found a very clean copy of Pet Sounds. But when I got to the counter, he priced it at $15 which was about the sum of the three records below. So I didn’t buy it. I picked up:
- Man machine: Kraftwerk
- Blood on the Tracks: Bob Dylan
- Highway 61 Revisited: Bob Dylan
Saturday night was spent swing dancing to a live jazz band in Squirrel Hill. I went with a few friends and ran into some others. The moves were a little rusty. Dr. Zoot, a live band played too.
And last, but not least, watching the Steelers pulverise the Broncos was fun and definitely not as heartattacky as last week. I watched it at Roland’s in the Strip. Afterwards, I was driving to church and chose to drive down Butler Street in Lawrenceville. It was mayhem. People were all over the roads and sidewalks waving their terrible towels, shouting at the top of their lungs. Cars were honking their horns. Passengers were on vehicles, not just in them. I think I want to watch the Super Bowl at a place like that. Some place where it’ll be on the fringe of a riot.
Comments»
for some hip new jazz check out the Esbojorn Svensson Trio (E.S.T.). i caught them on the temple station here in philly a week ago. pretty darn good (especially from a guy who can dislike a lot of jazz).
check out ‘this year’s model’ by elvis costello–very, very good.
oh, and pet sounds is worth $15.
i don’t like change. why try to develop a taste for something that doesn’t appeal to you in the first place?
whatever happened to phish and pavement? elliot smith and jump little children?
sorry i missed you at new years. i hope you’re doing well, buddy.
zach
Dave Brubek is one of my all time favorite jazz musicians!! I just added Time Out to my collection around Christmas. AND AND AND I bought a turntable when I got my dresser, a few weeks ago. Now I just have to get my vinyl back…it’s sitting at my parents: my father said he was going to burn them onto cds about 2 years ago…
I adore Jerry’s. When I was in college, their Oakland store was one of my fave places to be. Almost all of my Carole King hails from that store.
Elvis Costello ROCKS! I am very partial to Veronica, from Spike. Have you got any of his duet albums? He gets with people you’d never pick for him like Bruce Backarack (sp?). I have the Cheiftain’s Bells of Dublin which is a Christmas album. Rebel Jesus, which features EC’s vocals, is one of my faves.
A recommend: are you into Brazilian Jazz at all? Charlie Bird does an amazing jazz guitar. I’d recommend anything by him. Since jazz wasn’t really parlayed at our house besides CB, I confused him with Charlie Parker until I knew better. They are very different. Here’s a link on Brazilian music history:
http://www.stanford.edu/group/brazil/html/bmh45-68.html
–SL, showing my roots as a librarian, what else?
I’m partial to Clifford Brown, a trumpeter from the Bebop era. He was an amazing soloist and is considered one of the best jazz trumpet players of all time. He doesn’t have a huge volume of work out there because he was killed in a car wreck when he was only 25. However, he does have a surprising amount of material out for having died so young. He has a great ballad album out called “Clifford Brown with Strings”. He also did some great work with Sarah Vaughn and Helen Merrill, if you’re into jazz with vocals. Some of his best-known work was in group with Max Roach. That work is often categorized “hard bop”.
If you haven’t checked them out, a good local (i.e. Pittsburgh) “Preservation Hall”-type jazz band is the Boilermaker Jazz Band. They’re definitely worth a listen. They also put on fun shows, so if you get the chance to see them live, I would recommend it.
There’s a local guy here in Boston that plays old-timey music on a banjo, dobro and this crazy guitar-machine thing he built. He’s basically a one-man band. He’s really good - check out his website at www.guitarmachine.com
At work I tend to listen to instrumental music since lyrics distract me from my work. So, I listen to Mogwai, The Six Parts Seven, Explosions in the Sky, Tortoise, Battles, Don Caballero, Mono, Lumen, El Ten Eleven, Friends of Dean Martinez, Tristeza, Unwed Sailor and some others. I would recommend all of them, though some are more accessible than others. You can get pretty cheap (non-DRM’ed, high bitrate) MP3s of a lot of these bands on www.emusic.com - definitely a lot cheaper than iTunes.
If you’re into Elvis Costello, you should check out his album with Burt Bacharach called Painted from Memory. I think they won a grammy for it. It’s really good.
Alright, I’m done.
Actually, the one of the main guys from the Boiler Maker JB plays at Bellefield in the mornings. I’ve seen them at the Wightman school for their swing dancing.
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Wow, thanks for all the recommendations. I hope to explore most of them. Especially some of the more instrumental ones. As Colin is, I’m easily distracted by vocals when I’m trying to code at work. I’ll let you know as things develop.
And the boilermaker jazz band IS good. They sometimes play at the Wightman school for swing dancing.