cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- You have not plugged in ze device properly. Go! Go! Go away! Last night Trish and Ida went to the grocery store while I stayed home to play with the baby. He's learning to drink from a sippy cup and he got milk all over himself but had a blast. I put on a Stan Getz CD and danced around with him. Then we sat down and I tapped out a samba rhythm for a bit while holding his hands. I did that a lot with Ida when she was a baby. Tapping out various rhythms along with music. She has very good natural rhythm now, which I attribute to the early training. That has got to have an effect on a baby's brain development when you do it repeatedly. There is a physical part of the brain associated with music comprehension which is slightly bigger in people who received musical training as small children. I am not in a position to give either of them formal piano lessons or anything like that. But I do happen to have extremely good natural rhythm myself and I think that by teaching my babies everything from a synchopated bossa nova beat to waltz time I am making it much easier for them to pick up an instrument in 10 years or so and hit the ground running if they want to do that. The specialized brain development will be there. Trish plays them way too much crap all day long. By crap I don't mean music that I hate. It's not without merit. The Killers, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Blur, Interpol, etc. All stuff that I myself like and listen to but it's not doing much of anything for Ida and Harry in terms of musical brain development. She played lots of opera for Ida when Ida was a baby and then I would come home and play her all kinds of interesting jazz. But Harry isn't getting enough of that. Trish doesn't listen to much opera in the past year since she isn't taking lessons at the moment. And my turntable isn't set up and most of my records are in storage so I can't play much jazz. The vast majority of my jazz collection is on vinyl. I should do something about this record situation this weekend. I also want to get my turntable set back up so that I can play my copy of 'Getz Au Go-Go' again. I think I have it on MP3 somewhere but it's not quite the same. If ever there was a perfect example of a recording being magically and inexplicably better on vinyl, this is it. My copy is an early pressing made before the the master tapes had begun to degrade (which is inevitable just from sitting on a shelf). They use some clever tricks to make 'remastered' recordings sound fresh nowadays, but it is a fact that you cannot actually restore the exact sounds that were lost. Only pretty up what's left. The best possible way to hear something that was recorded 40 years ago is not the brand new digitally remastered CD release or even the original master tapes but rather a very early vinyl pressing in good condition. Because a vinyl record does not degrade. You can put it in a safe for 100 years and it will come out in exactly the same condition that it went in. Not so with the magnetic tape that they used for the masters. Electrons flip here and there and the sound quality degrades just through the passing of time. Anyway, I remember the very first time I listened to that record. I'd been into Stan Getz and Charlie Byrd and all of that Carlos Jobim samba stuff since I was 15 years old and first checked 'Jazz Samba' out from the library on CD. So the actual songs were nothing new. But I'd been hearing everything up to that point on CD. And one day, about 4 years ago, when Mallory was working at a record store he'd held back a big pile of used jazz LPs for me to buy at wholesale prices. He'd just pulled them from the shelves as soon as they came in, knowing what I would probably want. This copy of 'Getz Au Go-Go' was among them and it was in fabulous condition. It's probably worth $50 at least. So I got home and that evening I was alone for some reason and I put the record on and it was like total magic. 'Corcovado' was the first song on the album and this recording of it started out with Astrud Gilberto half singing and half speaking the first lines into the microphone all by herself for a few bars before the instrumentation started. I can't quite explain it. It was like having her right there in the room with me. Like I was sitting right there in front of the stage at the Cafe Au Go Go in 1964. The music and the singer obviously had my full attention immediately and I sat down and did absolutely nothing for the next hour or so except listen to the album. Astrud Gilberto is interesting because she is not a particularly gifted singer in a technical sense yet is still very good. I find such singers interesting and have written about this fascination before. I think Nico from the Velvet Underground is like the bizarro version of Astrud Gilberto. Both women who were more or less drafted to sing for a group of professional musicians despite having basically no idea what they were doing. Both usually sang in english and leveraged the 'hot foreign chick' mystique that their accents lent them. Neither had much in the way of range. Except of course that Nico went for sort of an ice queen thing and is often painful to listen to while Astrud has a very warm, plaintive voice that is always pleasant to hear. If Astrud had not been a singer, she'd have made a very good telephone operator or staff for the Dell technical support hot line or something. It's a voice that one likes to listen to. Even if she had no idea how to help you, that would be ok. You couldn't get mad at her. Wheras Nico would have been a total disaster as tech support. I mean, just imagine it. "You have not plugged in ze device properly. Go! Go! Go away!" 11:58 a.m. - 2007-11-27 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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