innerspaceboy

Thanks, Ribbons!

On a related note, I have a copy of the excellent book, Audio Culture: Readings In Modern Music which collects various essays and music manifestos and which includes a piece titled, "Plunderphonia" by Chris Cutler.

I did some digging and tracked down a copy of the full essay without a paywall here.

__________________
The Innerspace Connection | Essential Recordings | Top Archives | Hot 100 Albums | Top 550 Artists

ribbons

Thanks so much for tracking down the "Plunderphonia" essay! Audio Culture is an amazing book - I actually have a used copy on my shelves, but unfortunately never managed to read the majority of the including "Plunderphonia" (I recall making a beeline for the Eno and Ornette Coleman-related stuff, then dropping off!). So it's a treat to have this digital copy at hand now. Thanks as well for posting the Everything Is A Remix, which I'm definitely looking forward to watching.

innerspaceboy

Building a Survey of Jazz: A Brief Summary of the Larger Jazz-Related Collections in My Library



I have a decent starter-collection of jazz vinyl, focusing primarily on Miles Davis' catalog including the 6LP Miles at the Fillmore box set, as well as a selection of the better quality big band box sets on wax. But I've been working on building the digital portion of my jazz collection, the larger box sets of which total 1,626 albums. These highlights help me add a sense of order to the 22,000 jazz recordings in my digital library.

To date, my focus has been on essential classics, vocal jazz standards, the crooners, tin pan alley, jazz pop (1920-1960), highlights of avant-garde jazz, the big bands, swing, a bit of ECM, future jazz (in the electronic realm), film noir scores, gypsy jazz / jazz manouche, and their related subgenres. I've been in the mood to explore The Great American Songbook, (jazz vocal standards by Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Ellington, etc), so I started doing some research.

I'm no jazz expert, but some preliminary Google searches, list-generators, and review surveys provided me with sufficient information to begin building a respectable personal library. One intriguing release offered for sale on Toronto's JazzFM website was an astonishingly large 500 CD box set called, The World's Greatest Jazz Collection. Of course, due to licensing restrictions, the set lacks some of the classic milestone recordings which come to mind when such a title is raised, but the sound quality and sheer volume of the collection warranted its addition to my library.

The 500-CD World's Greatest Jazz Collection comprises five 100-disc sub sets:

• 100-CD Bebop Story box set
  
• 100-CD The Big Bands box set
  
• 100-CD Classic Jazz box set
  
• 100-CD Modern Jazz box set
  
• 100-CD Swing Time box set

Next I tackled building discographic archives of key figures in the history of classic and modern jazz. Larger jazz artist discographies in my archive include but are not limited to the following:

• 156-CD Thelonious Monk discography
  
• 135-CD Keith Jarrett discography
  
• 100-CD RateYourMusic.com's Top 100 Future Jazz LPs
  
• 98-CD Miles Davis discography
  
• 78-CD Jimmy Smith discography
  
• 75-CD Sun Ra discography
  
• 61-CD Ornette Coleman discography
  
• 52-CD Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers discography
  
• 43-CD Herbie Hancock discography
  
• 43-CD Jimmy McGriff discography
  
• 40-CD Duke Ellington discography
  
• 35-CD Charles Mingus discography
  
• 30-CD John Coltrane discography
  
• 22-CD Dave Brubeck discography
  
• 16-CD Future Sounds of Jazz box set

as well as the 16-CD Diana Krall discography. (My late father was a fan and sparked my interest in her catalog when I was starting college.)

And as I've discussed in former features, I worked hard to build analog and digital archives of the finest big band collections ever issued to the public. Some of these were exclusively available from mail order subscription services on vinyl and later on compact disc, but thankfully, archivists around the world have painstakingly digitized the vinyl-exclusive volumes and produced complete digital libraries of these sets at professional archival quality.

In my Big Band Archive I have:

• 30-LP box set of Time Life: The Big Bands
  
• 27-CD Ken Burns Jazz Series and Jazz: The Story of America’s Music (22-CD + 5CD)
  
• 11-LP box set of The Great Band Era
  
• 10-volume Benny Goodman Collection
  
• 7-volume The Big Bands box set
  
• 4-CD Smithsonian Big Band Jazz archive
  
• 2-disc Glenn Miller Gold Collection
  
• 1-CD The Glenn Miller Orchestra Collection

Other smaller and more precisely-focused jazz collections in my library include:

• 8 CDs from the Jazz Moods series
  
• 6 of the essential albums by The Bill Evans Trio
  
• 6-CD Gypsy Jazz / Jazz Manouche box set
  
• 5-CD 100 Hits American Songbook box set which includes one hundred standards recorded by Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Tony Bennett, Billie Holiday, Nat King Cole, Shirley Bassey, Sammy Davis Jr, and more.
  
• 5-CD Film Noir jazz series collection
  
• 3-CD Complete Recordings of Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong
  
• and the single-disc Complete Recordings of Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong

My collection is leagues away from exhaustive or complete in the vast scope of the world of jazz - an insurmountable task for certain, but I've done my best to construct a modest library showcasing the key subgenres I enjoy most. These will provide me with years of listening enjoyment on lazy Sundays and on my afternoon drives queued up in the car from my personal media server.

In an effort to determine the best recordings to sample first, I began compiling various “best-of” lists. Rateyourmusic user erikfish found 22 "top jazz albums of all time" lists in books, magazines and web sites and combined them into one meta-list here. And TheJazzResource.com compiled a similar list of the Top 25 Jazz Albums of All Time. Spinditty published a feature on Ten Coltrane Albums Every Jazz Fan Should Own and NPR put together a similar roster called The Cocktail Party Guide To John Coltrane. I also assembled some of my own lists including Modal Jazz Essentials, Recordings of the First Great Quintet (Davis and Trane in ‘56), as well as 17 Essential Hard Bop Recordings courtesy of critic Scott Yanow and a Top Ten Essentials list of Thelonious Monk LPs.

I would love to hear your recommendations for your favorite titles from the collections mentioned above which deserve priority listening, or your suggestions for other collections which would complement my current library. If I've any glaring omissions, please let me know! I'm always eager to learn.

__________________
The Innerspace Connection | Essential Recordings | Top Archives | Hot 100 Albums | Top 550 Artists

OccultHawk

I made a listening guide for jazz appreciation on freak fighter:

https://www.musicbanter.com/members-...ml#post1965257

also do you know about piero scaruffi?

https://www.scaruffi.com/jazz/best100.html

__________________

2016 2017 2018 2019 2020

Member of the Year & Journal of the Year Champion

Behold the Writing of THE LEGEND:

https://www.musicbanter.com/members-...p-lighter.html

innerspaceboy

Outstanding! Your initial listening list mirrors much of what I've compiled, and that Scaruffi content looks marvelously comprehensive! Thanks very much for chiming in!

__________________
The Innerspace Connection | Essential Recordings | Top Archives | Hot 100 Albums | Top 550 Artists

innerspaceboy

I've had some vacation time on my hands and I wanted to stay productive, so I dedicated some time to refining and expanding my library of materials relating to the original canon of Sherlock Holmes and the early and most treasured adaptations. I've always wanted to explore classic detective fiction, and there is undeniably no better place to start than with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

For my physical collection, I began by tracking down an original 1967 first-single-volume-edition of The Annotated Sherlock Holmes, comprising the complete texts of the four novels and fifty-six short stories, accompanied by an introduction, notes, maps, diagrams, photographs, and drawings - an indispensable possession for all mystery fans. The book is monstrously oversized in a single mammoth volume, but fortunately I found a mahogany bookcase the exact size of the edition's slipcase to display it proudly over my fireplace. I secured a digital ebook archive of the complete texts as well to facilitate casual reading on the go and started my perusal.

Here is the book in its bookcase:



And some of the lovely annotations:





Also in the spirit of the canon, I tracked down a high-resolution copy of my favorite illustration from the original adventures published in The Strand Magazine between 1891 and 1892 by Sidney Paget and had it printed and framed for my home.



Next it seemed appropriate to secure an exhaustive audio library of all major radio adaptations of the original tales and related materials. My 223-disc Sir Arthur Conan Doyle audio collection includes the following:

- CBS Radio Mystery Theater - The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (83 CD Set)
- The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes BBC Radio Dramas (79 CD Set)
- The Complete Sherlock Holmes Audiobooks 9 Volumes Unabridged (60 CD Set)
- The Immortal Sherlock Holmes - Orson Welles, Mercury Theater 1938-09-25

And for my video library, I've acquired the Blu-ray Complete Collection of Basil Rathbone's portrayals of Holmes and Nigel Bruce as Dr. John H. Watson - fourteen films produced between 1939-1946, which comprises:

- The Hound of the Baskervilles (1939)
- The Adventures Of Sherlock Holmes (1939)
- The Voice Of Terror (1942)
- The Secret Weapon (1942)
- Sherlock Holmes In Washington (1943)
- Sherlock Holmes Faces Death (1943)
- The Spider Woman (1944)
- The Scarlet Claw (1944)
- The Pearl Of Death (1944)
- The House Of Fear (1945)
- The Woman In Green (1945)
- Pursuit To Algiers (1945)
- Terror By Night (1946)
- The Secret Code-Dressed To Kill (1946)



These sleuthing adventures will be a joy to explore during the remainder of my vacation.

I've done my best to survey Wikipedia's pages of the original canon as well as the wonderful Baker Street Wiki at https://bakerstreet.fandom.com to ensure that nothing was overlooked. Still, if I've omitted any other classic materials which one might regard as essential to the original Sherlock Holmes universe, I would welcome suggestions for additional content. But the library outlined above should give me plenty to explore through the chilly winter ahead.

“The game is afoot.”

__________________
The Innerspace Connection | Essential Recordings | Top Archives | Hot 100 Albums | Top 550 Artists

innerspaceboy

My neighborhood is mostly a silent retirement community, save for my immediate next-door drunken and openly-racist neighbor who routinely blasts classic rock FM radio while he burns fires right outside my bedroom window every night when I'm trying to sleep. The music is so loud that I can’t read or do anything to distract myself from the racket. Speaking to him was hopeless, and I've had the police out but he starts it up again the very next night.

No amount of my gentle classical or ambient music could drown out his onslaught of staticy AC/DC and car adverts. I felt trapped in my own home and would likely have to endure this every night until the winter and again through all the fairer seasons. I needed a solution, and fast.

I came up with the idea to invest in a quality pair of active noise-cancelling headphones.

A very quick overview for those not immediately familiar with active noise cancellation technology - microphones built into the headphones pick up the noise around the listener. An adaptive algorithm analyzes the waveform of the background noise, then generates a signal that will either phase shift or invert the polarity of the original noise. This inverted signal (in antiphase) is then amplified and a transducer creates a sound wave directly proportional to the amplitude of the original waveform, creating destructive interference. This effectively reduces the volume of the perceivable noise.

In short, its technology frees me from being subjected to an endless loop of "Comfortably Numb," "Stairway to Heaven," "Sweet Child 'O Mine," and "Hotel California."

One of the most popular active noise-cancelling circumaural closed-back headphones on the market is the Bose QuietComfort 35, usually priced at around $300. Thankfully, Amazon offered a highly-competitive contender to those headphones at a fraction of the price.

A few quick specs of the solution I found:

• Customer Reviews - 4.4 out of 5 stars from 11,799 Reviews
  
• Best Sellers Rank - #1 in Over-Ear Headphones
  
• Sound - Hi-Res sound via 40 mm dynamic drivers, BassUp technology, dual EQ modes
  
• Noise Cancelation - 4-microphone hybrid active noise cancellation for music, uplink noise reduction for calls
  
• Playtime - 60 Hours (ANC off), 40 Hours (ANC on) or use the included AUX cable for unlimited listening in wired mode.
  
• Fast Charging - Charge for 5 minutes, listen for 4 hours
  
• Connectivity - Bluetooth 5, AUX
  
• Other Features - Foldable design with ergonomic headband, memory foam ear cups and multi-point rotation, travel pouch
  
• Date First Available - March 21, 2019

And these headphones were discounted 25% off for a final price of just $44.99 with free shipping and free returns. I initially hesitated and missed the Amazon sale but found the exact same sale price from the manufacturer’s official new product listing on eBay with 779 units sold and a 5-star product rating from all buyers. I knew better than to pass up the second opportunity and ordered them on the spot.

The model is the Soundcore Life Q20 by Anker, featuring hybrid active noise-cancellation, which they explain thusly:

Hybrid ANC is the best noise cancelling technology which combines feedforward and feedback ANC by placing a microphone both on the inside and outside of the earpiece. Therefore it can suppress noise over a wider frequency range, adapt to and correct errors and is less sensitive to sound angle and user wear.

The New York Times’ Wirecutter staff review called them "The best budget noise-cancelling headphones under $100."

These headphones pair with up to two Bluetooth devices and in addition to noise-cancellation feature action controls for volume, play/pause, previous/next track, and phone call controls all from the earpiece. And as I mentioned in the specs list, the 60 hour (ANC off) / 40 hour (ANC on) wireless run time and unlimited wired listening as well as the fast-charging feature where a 5 minute charge provides 4 hours of wireless listening make these an incredibly viable solution for sudden instances of unwanted ambient noise.

The earcups swivel and the headband can be manipulated in all directions, providing resilient durability and increased comfort like you’re not wearing any headphones at all, making this model a strong contender punching well above its weight to compete with professional headsets at seven times its price point. The Q20s reduce ambient noise by up to 90%. They are particularly effective masking lower frequencies which are often the most problematic undesired sounds.

I just put them on, queue up a soft sound bed like Robert Rich’s seven-hour Somnium sleep concert, and drift off undisturbed. And with the wireless Bluetooth feature I am free to walk around my home wearing them, blissfully free of my neighbor’s sonic assault.

Problem solved.

__________________
The Innerspace Connection | Essential Recordings | Top Archives | Hot 100 Albums | Top 550 Artists

The Batlord

Bro, you're the nerd with the ecpensive equipment. Drown out his dinosaur rock with noise music.

__________________

innerspaceboy

A friend of mine said the very same, encouraging me to spin Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music at full volume with my speakers pointed out the window at his house.



Thanks for indulging my rant!

__________________
The Innerspace Connection | Essential Recordings | Top Archives | Hot 100 Albums | Top 550 Artists

OccultHawk

For real your obnoxious neighbor can be right outside your window blasting AOR FM Radio and you can’t hear it at all even if you’re just listening to gentle ambient music on those things? I don’t exactly know how noise cancellation works but I never thought it was capable of that. I’ll definitely go in for a pair of those because I hate my neighbors so much just hearing them even for a second makes me want to get my revolver. Any reminder of their existence drives me nuts. So when you say right outside your window are talking you could lean out and spit on them close? I mean, how effective does this really shut out the rest of the audio world even if you’re listening to soft music? I’m not going to buy this and be like goddamnit I can still hear these ****ing ****s, am I? Because like Batlord said I just turn up whatever I’m listening to however loud it takes. I just use rubber earbuds that clog up your whole ear so that blocks a ****load of sound. Cheap little bastard but they sound good to me.

Sidenote: I hate the mic for talking on the phone ****. I don’t talk on the ****ing phone. That solves that one.

__________________

2016 2017 2018 2019 2020

Member of the Year & Journal of the Year Champion

Behold the Writing of THE LEGEND:

https://www.musicbanter.com/members-...p-lighter.html