The music of my life

So I found this very, very cool toy online today. It's called Mixwit, and you can make virtual mix tapes with it and post them on your blogger blog or facebook profile and lots of other stuff. Love it!

I just posted my first mix tape, which is called "Men I've Loved" The songs that make me think of them.

Included on the tape are Mr. Tambourine Man, for my first serious boyfriend, Mark - he was Bob Dylan's biggest fan. Always On My Mind is for the first guy I ever really fell In Love with. His name was Willy...it was my first year of college. He Made A Woman Out of Me...well, you get one guess to figure out who that's about. His name was Robbie. More than This is for Hugh...my first major love affair and live-in lover. Roxy Music was his favourite band. A Groovy Kind of Love is for my ex, Phil. It's the song I would have had as our first dance, had we had a dance at our wedding. Which we didn't. Johnny B. Good is for George, because it's by Jerry Lee Lewis, who was a lot older than his lady love. Layla is for a guy I fell in love with online. So is Dark End of the Street. At Last is for Moe, my last boyfriend, because the song really said how I felt for a while after I fell in love with him...at last, my love has come along. Into the Mystic is my theme song for the time I lived in Halifax, so that one is for Cute Newf. And Smoke Baby is for a special friend who shared a special night with me in Montreal several years ago.

I love... Soundtracks

I don't remember when or why I bought my first soundtrack, but of all the kinds of music I have, that's by far the most greatly represented genre in my CD collection. Just picked up two more today, so I thought it would be a good excuse for a blog.

At the moment, I have 27 soundtracks/scores - mostly from movies, but two or three from TV shows - out of a total of about 175 CDs. I know...not a big collection, and I'm not a downloader either. I'm not a "collector." I only buy music I really like.

The thing I like about soundtracks is that they bring together, on one disk, several different artists and even different genres, but they all work well together. It's also great to be introduced to artists and genres you might not know about or think of listening to otherwise. For instance, I'd never have been inclined to go out and look for CDs with "Dem Bones" or "Iko Iko" on them, but since they're both on the Rainman soundtrack, I've got them, and sing along gustily whenever they're playing. Coincidentally, Iko Iko is also on the Big Easy soundtrack. Nor would I ever have gone out and bought a CD full of heavy metal, but the soundtracks to both Triple X (XXX) and Gone in 60 Seconds have some really hard stuff on them that I love.

I also discovered that I love the dreamy, chant-like music from movies like Gladiator and The Insider...both of which include several performances by Lisa Gerrard. And that led me to other artists like Mother Tongue, whose style is similar.

The right music can make a good scene so much better. The best example of that that I can think of was in the final scene of the most recent season finale of House. House has to choose two interns from the handful remaining after the season-long elimination round. He really wants three -- after all, he had three before. But Cuddy says he can only have two. So he hires two men. Upon discovering this, Cuddy comes storming in to see him and says "you can't have two men...we'll get in trouble for discrimination. At that moment "Spirit in the Sky" starts playing...those uber-cool riffy opening chords playing loud as a devious and triumphant smile begins to spread across House's face, and Cuddy's face shows that she's just realized she's been had. House gets all three of the interns he wanted. Game, set, match. And it just wouldn't have been nearly as good without just that right music.

So...herewith is the current list of my soundtrack collection, in no particular order...

• Gladiator includes some really powerful orchestral stuff. One track in particular - The Battle - never fails to send shivers up my spine and always has me playing "air-conductor"...really, really rousing stuff.)
• Passion (the Jesus movie, featuring music by Peter Gabriel
• The Insider (Russell Crowe, Al Pacino true story about a guy who exposed the cigarette industry
• Deadwood (from David Milch's brilliant but too-short three-season opus magnum about a western mining town finding its way to civilization)
• Desperado (Antonio Banderas flick)
• American Beauty (Kevin Spacey flick)
• The Wizard of Oz (my favourite movie of all time)
• The Commitments (of course...this is a staple in most people's collections)
• Gone in 60 Seconds (rousing, hard-hitting rock)
• xXx (Vin Diesel flick...more rousing stuff)
• Rainman (One of the modern classics. Some great, funky, quirky tunes on this)
• Immortal Beloved (Gary Oldman's biopic about Beethoven)
• Thelma & Louise (One of my favourits, both the movie and the soundtrack)
• Matrix (just cuz I really liked that hard-driving theme music)
• Pulp Fiction (see below)
• Reservoir Dogs (as above, a Quentin Terantino movie. Both soundtracks feature delightful - and profane - snippets of dialogue from the movies between tracks. Brilliant collections)
• The English Patient (another of my favourites. Ralph Fiennes stars. Music is an odd - and oddly workable - mix of old jazz, classical, blues and score music, and even has a hauntingly beautiful Czech song called Szerelem, Szerelem [Love, Love] which never fails send shivers up my spine.
• Fried Green Tomatoes (Not one of my faves)
• City of Angels (and awesome, awesome collection of really great music. I can listen to this one over and over and over)
• Forest Gump (includes 32 "American Classics - so says the liner)
• X-Files (meh...wasn't a good choice, in spite of the fact that it includes the classic series theme music)
• Wonder Boys (Really good collection, featuring four Bob Dylan tunes)
• Practical Magic (great collection featuring two Stevie Nicks tunes, and my favourite Joni Mitchell song, "A Case of You"
• Cold Mountain (Nicole Kidman flick. I liked the hillbilly sound of the movie music, but the soundtrack didn't seem to capture the goodness that was in the film)
• The Big Easy (One of my top three soundtracks - great zydeco music that you can't sit still to)
• House (one of my new aquisitions. Not too impressive. It concentrates mostly on familiar tunes, when I was hoping for some of the really quirky stuff they often have on the show. And no, I couldn't tell that from reading the liner before buying it...I suck at remember song titles and artists)
• Black Snake Moan (on the player as I write this. Pretty good stuff. I love that old-style black blues with the electric slide guitar. Sexy stuff)
  

What's all the fuss about?

I don't get jazz music, I really don't.

Recently on CBC2, the radio station that plays classical music most of the time, they rearranged their evening schedule and now every evening at 6pm comes a show called Tonic. Tonic is a jazz show, and since I'm often driving home after 6pm, I've recently been getting to hear a great deal of jazz.

But I don't get it! I can't understand how people get pleasure from listening to it. All my life, when someone has asked me what kind of music do I NOT like, my answer has been "rap and opera...oh yeah, and experimental jazz."

So much of it sounds like five guys all playing different songs together. Musical primadonnas who can't agree on which song to play so they all do their own thing, oblivious to the others. It's atonal, no one is keeping the same beat, it's full of the inexplicable, drowsy thump-thumping of the bass, hyperactive horns, drums that don't keep time with any of the other instruments. None of it fits together.

How come people like this stuff so much? Am I missing something? Do I have aural colour-blindness? Is there some secret to jazz appreciation that no-one's let me in on yet? Or am I perhaps like the kid in the story, pointing out the emperor's "new clothes" ? I picture all these cool cats and chicks sitting around in a dark smoky cafe grooving to smooth jazz in their black clothes and berets and I think...are they just pretending, or what? Surely they can't really like this??

So I'm going to write to the host of Tonic and ask her to please tell me what all the fuss about. Why is jazz so popular, why has it lasted so long, why is it so highly regarded by people who you'd think would know better? And then I'm going to ask her to try and explain to me how I can enjoy it too. I'm willing to try.

An entertaining week

I should go to bed, but I can't just come home, no matter how late it is, and go straight to bed. I always need some wind-down time. So I might as well use that time well!

Tonight I went to the first of two concerts I'll be attending this week. TWO! I think that's a first for me! Tonia and I went to see the Rankin Family at the Civic Centre.

Oh my god, what a wonderful, wonderful show! Both of us were in tears three or four times through the evening. Tonia's worst was during "Fare Thee Well," which was one of her late mother's favourite songs. My worst was during "Gillis Mountain." That's not a song I'd have expected to get so emotional over, but there were some descriptive passages in it that gave me a powerful flashback of driving down along Bras D'Or Lake on Cape Breton Island after a few days in Sydney. The sun sparkling off the water of the huge lake far below on my right, the tree-studded mountains rising up high above me on the left. Everything looking so perfect and right. The song made me feel intensely nostalgic for a place I've only visited a few times.

We both cried during "Rise Again," which is my all-time favourite Rankin song. I can never sing along to it without crying. It's just so moving to me. Ironic, as I never wanted to have children.

It was a real goose-bumpy moment during the first song when the three girls finally opened their mouths and started to sing. It's always so amazing when you finally hear a band live that you've only ever experienced electronically. There's an incredible fullness to the experience that can never be duplicated, even on the best sound system. Even if you close your eyes and just listen, it's better.

Jimmy Rankin has a nice voice and he lends a great texture to the group's sound, but it's the girls who really make the sound shine. There's something so perfect about their voices. Each of them alone is stunning, but together they sound like one voice with an impossible depth of tone and texture. Listening to them, it occurred to me that if the sound of someone like Barbra Streisand can be compared to a rich, smooth red wine, then the sound of the Rankins is a pure, crisp white. Cleansing, refreshing, invigorating. Goosebump-inspiring.

And there's a new Rankin! The daughter of the late John Morris Rankin, who died seven years ago in a car crash on Cape Breton. I'd been expecting to see Molly Rankin on the stage tonight, having read on their website that she has written some music for the group, and performs herself. Well.... what a voice! What a delicious new sound! She sounds like a Rankin, but there's this fantastic newness about her sound. Like old and new melded together into something completely unique and wonderful. Both Tonia and I felt this different sound reminded us of some other singer, perhaps Billy Holliday (sp?)...which is odd, as such a new sound reminding us of a classic singer. It's someone else too though...it'll come to me eventually.

Molly is a very gifted fiddler and a step-dancer too!

I think that if I could gather a small group of loved ones around me, and if we could all open our mouths and sound as captivating as the Rankin Family does, that I would never, ever stop singing. There was sheer joy there.