[78-L] Introduction (a bit long)

[Bart]

At 09:20 PM 6/27/2009 EDT, DRJAZZ78 at aol.com wrote:
>
>Bart,
> 
>    Welcome to the list!  Hope to learn more about  what your tastes are; 
>mine are jazz and dance 1920-38.  
> 
>Doug
>Edmonds, WA
>

Thanks.  

For some listening to the music of the later years of the 78rpm era is an
exercise in nostalgia.  Nothing wrong with that, but inevitably there will
be fewer people who relate to any early records that way as the years roll
on.  

I'm interested in their setting in the larger culture.  I guess I take a
historian's approach.  I'm fascinated by the opportunity to hear the music,
comedy, art, - literally the voices - of another age.  You can not hear
with your own ears Ceasar, Napoleon, or Abraham Lincoln; but you can hear
Teddy Roosevelt.  We are the first generations in the march of the
centuries to do be able to do that.  We stand at the begining of *recorded*
history.  I'm surprized that more people don't find that exciting.

When I discover something different, somthing I've never heard before,
whether it's Edward M. Favor or Paul Whiteman or Pappy Lee O'Daniel or
Mississippi John Hurt (just to shoot genres off in multiple directions) I'm
hooked.

But I begin to loose interest somewhere in the mid to late thirties, with
the big swing bands, not because there's anything wrong with the music but
just because I've heard it before.  Chattanooga Choo Choo has been in
cartoons and movies, records and radio, televison, and mangled by all sorts
of amateur musical assemblages.  Whether you like the tune or agree with
Artie Shaw that "Glenn Miller should have lived and Chattanooga Choo Choo
should have died", 
there's not much more to be discovered by hearing it again.

As to what I actually listen to the most: I don't favor one genre strongly
over others.  I like songs with lyrics somewhat more than instrumentals and
dance numbers, in a ratio of 3 or 4 sung to 1 just played.  I like humor,
whether the funny song and the comedy act.  I'm not interested in foreign
language recordings (meaning not English), except for a few in Spanish
simple enough for me to understand, occasional exception noted.  And only a
little classical music will really attract my attention; I'm just not that
well educated about classical music.  Draw a bell curve over the years 1900
to 1945, and then adjust it so it centers on '27-'28 instead of '22-'23 and
that will give you the distribution of the age of music I most enjoy.  I like 
early, bouncy jazz "tell the orchestra to play staccato, then you add a
little obligato" as Billy Murray and Isabelle Patricola sang in "When You
and I Were Young Maggie Blues".  Somewhere along jazz's long history it
seems to have become a music that's more fun to play than to listen to.
But to each their own.

Bart