Greatest Albums of All Time (Rock & Jazz) - Music Diaries

DelBocaVista

Hey, what would you say the instrumentals on Soft Machine's Third are trying to express? And, is the album tainted by Moon In June being unrelated?

AfterHours

Gender: Male
Location: originally from scaruffi.com ;-)

DelBocaVista wrote:

Hey, what would you say the instrumentals on Soft Machine's Third are trying to express? And, is the album tainted by Moon In June being unrelated?

Nah, I don't think it's tainted at all. Though the other tracks are quite good, Moon in June, above all else, is what elevates it to 8.8/10+. And it's not particularly incongruous anyway, imo.

Let me revisit it before I go into specifics of its emotional/conceptual content. Just too many Classical works impressed upon my mind right now to really think with it.
_________________
Best Classical
Best Films
Best Paintings

Facetious

Gender: Male
Age: 24
Location: Somewhere you've never been

The Velvet Underground live album is the original vinyl version, or the CD with two bonus tracks (a shorter version of Heroin and I Can't Stand It)?

AfterHours

Gender: Male
Location: originally from scaruffi.com ;-)

Facetious wrote:

The Velvet Underground live album is the original vinyl version, or the CD with two bonus tracks (a shorter version of Heroin and I Can't Stand It)?

This one: https://www.amazon.com/Velvet-Undergrou...&qid=1
_________________
Best Classical
Best Films
Best Paintings

Facetious

Gender: Male
Age: 24
Location: Somewhere you've never been

AfterHours wrote:

This one: https://www.amazon.com/Velvet-Undergrou...&qid=1

Ah yes, that's the original vinyl version. I was asking because the CD version has two more tracks, which might affect your rating, or maybe not.

AfterHours

Gender: Male
Location: originally from scaruffi.com ;-)

Facetious wrote:

Ah yes, that's the original vinyl version. I was asking because the CD version has two more tracks, which might affect your rating, or maybe not.

Ok cool, I will check if I've heard that one. I've been listening to the VU for about 20 years, so it's probable I have -- even though I wasn't really aware there were separate versions particularly. I don't generally count "bonus tracks" unless perhaps if the artist intended them as an updated and actual version of the album itself.
_________________
Best Classical
Best Films
Best Paintings

Facetious

Gender: Male
Age: 24
Location: Somewhere you've never been

AfterHours wrote:

Ok cool, I will check if I've heard that one. I've been listening to the VU for about 20 years, so it's probable I have -- even though I wasn't really aware there were separate versions particularly. I don't generally count "bonus tracks" unless perhaps if the artist intended them as an updated and actual version of the album itself.

Well the album itself is not really a product put together by the band, as far as I know. You might want to check out The Complete Matrix Tapes by the way. It's a much more complete record (as implied by the name), with all four sets the band played at the club, most of which ended up on the Live 1969 album (according to Wikipedia, only four of the songs on the Live 1969 album are not Matrix recordings).

AfterHours

Gender: Male
Location: originally from scaruffi.com ;-)

Facetious wrote:

Well the album itself is not really a product put together by the band, as far as I know. You might want to check out The Complete Matrix Tapes by the way. It's a much more complete record (as implied by the name), with all four sets the band played at the club, most of which ended up on the Live 1969 album (according to Wikipedia, only four of the songs on the Live 1969 album are not Matrix recordings).

Thank you, sounds badass Cool

_________________
Best Classical
Best Films
Best Paintings

boyd94

Purely out of curiosity, is there any indication of a rating /10 for Scaruffi's Jazz selections?

As a rule of thumb, would it be safe to say that if it appears on his "best of the decade" then it's 8+, on up to 9.5 for the highest selections, Black Saint and A Love Supreme etc.?

Also, what's the rationale behind his main Jazz list of 163 records? It doesn't seem to have any correspondence to his decade lists (as he himself notes), just wondering what its purpose is.

Kool Keith Sweat

I wouldn't use Scaruffi for jazz recommendations. One reason being this quote

Scaruffi wrote:

Live albums are usually... bad albums. The improvised format rarely yields good music. A studio album has been made (hopefully) by selecting the best takes of a piece. The odds that a live version is as good as a studio version are rather slim. Which is exactly what I keep finding in live albums: bad versions of studio cuts.

I hope you can understand that a critical approach to jazz with this mentality is one built on sand because of the necessity of improvisation and performance to jazz. Forget having a set definition of jazz, but you'd be hard-pressed to find one - from literally any decent critic and any "jazz" musician - that doesn't include something about improvisation and performance. Absurd.

The other reason being that, though many of the albums he lists are good to great, it's the same 60s/70s-biased inside/outside to free/~~spiritual~~~ selections that you get literally any where else on the internet. His taste is just barely not generic. I believe he thinks jazz pretty much stopped happening towards the end of the '70s outside of a few musicians like Melford, Perelman, Gregorio, Shipp, and Bloom (did I hit literally every single one he's mentioned post-'80), and I believe he thinks many musicians that he praises for their 60s/70s output just stopped making music past 1980. Allmusic is a more helpful resource for working through the music and musicians up to the mid-'00s; freejazzblog is your best bet in the '10s. RYM is also usually trash. Just follow all your favorite musicians on facebook (even the dead ones) and you'll learn more about them and their music than you would from a critic