I just sent in a typically miscellaneous show in which I managed to call Claudio Monteverdi Giueseppe Monteverdi instead, and mistranslated a French album title. Oh well.
But I do wonder, assuming anyone out there is listening at all, what sort of listener response there might be to the largely jazz/classical music mix I’ve been putting together. That mix reflects my own tastes as a listener—as does the lesser admixture of world music, which would be larger if I were more knowledgeable—but it also reflects the contents of most of the conversations I’ve had with jazz musicians in the last few years. Most often, when I ask someone what they’re listening to—I won’t name names, but you’d know them if I did—I’m more likely to hear about classical music than jazz. Any jazz or just taintradio listeners having the same experience, or at least the same predilections?
In the course of my clarinet show, Updoc #5, I mentioned getting seriously into classical music in response to reading Robert Stone’s novel A Hall of Mirrors back when it came out and I was 21 years old: I thought that if anyone as hip as Stone was into Mozart to the degree he was, there must be something to it, so I set out from the nearer shores of Bartok and Stravinsky to try to understand the whole tradition, even if where I lived had more to do with Trane and other jazz giants of that time.
My yen for classical music was redoubled when, working as a jazz critic in the late seventies, I had a pressing need to listen to music of which I was not professionally required to come up with an opinion, and even occasionally a judgment—although I wrote mostly as an enthusiast, and seldom even reviewed albums I disliked, and only then when the musicians were financially secure enough not to be adversely affected, if that might be possible. These days I listen to at least as much classical music as jazz, and for reasons of pure pleasure, though as it happens, listening to the jazz programming on taintradio, which has been pretty terrific, has got me swinging back the other way.
So anyway: I’d be grateful for listener response to what I’ve been putting on the e-air, and shucks, I’ll be sad if no one writes.
Best regards::::::::::Rafi Zabor