It's probably no surprise to anyone that I think it's a great list . . . with some "must go for" albums (John Allemeier, Donnacha Dennehy,Meredith Monk and probably a few more)
Witer/editor Steve Smith (formerly at Time Out New York, now recently moved to the Boston Globe) has started a column called "Newer Music", and the latest features the return of electronic artist Asher Tuil to the music scene and bandcamp, and tacks on Steve's 2014 list of "new classical" at the end. No overlap with Nereffid's, that I can tell.
1. ANNE GUTHRIE
Codiaeum variegatum French-horn player, composer, and acoustician Guthrie leads a richly teeming, infinitely detailed imaginary journey through the secret lives of plants.
2. MICHAEL PISARO
Continuum Unbound Working with close collaborators across a span of three discs, Pisaro frames an untamed expanse of nature sounds, then proceeds to interject and interact deftly.
3. IAN WILLIAM CRAIG
A Turn of Breath Looping and layering strands of fragile voice, instruments, and ambient sounds, Craig fashions heart-rending one-man litanies.
4. KATE SOPER
Voices From the Killing Jar Sopers dramatic song cycle intertwines the tales of eight entrapped women from fiction and myth, voiced by the composer with lithe assurance and mordant bite.
5. PETER HAMMILL
. . . All That Might Have Been . . . At 66, the Van der Graaf Generator frontman issued what might be his most ambitious project, cutting and pasting songs into a seamless cinematic flow thats disorienting yet strangely alluring.
6. CHRIS CERRONE
Invisible Cities Eloquently performed by young LA opera company the Industry, Cerrones gorgeous, dreamlike setting of Italo Calvinos novel comes in an appropriately opulent package.
7. ANNA THORVALDSDOTTIR
Aerial Among the most exciting talents to emerge in recent years, Icelands Thorvaldsdottir found a new home for her elemental works on the venerable Deutsche Grammophon label.
8. BILL SEAMAN & JOHN SUPKO
s_traits Seaman, Supko, and their circuitry transform more than 100 hours of old tapes and aural detritus into a suite of perky, jittery miniatures, confounding and intoxicating at once.
9. DAVID SYLVIAN
Theres a Light That Enters Houses With No Other House in Sight Sylvians enigmatic sculpted improvisations align hauntingly with reflections on mortality from poet Franz Wrights Kindertotenwald, read by Wright with plainspoken finality.
10. KEIR NEURINGER
Ceremonies Out of the Air One man, one saxophone and still, a whole world of fine detail and dramatic sweep emerges in this imaginative, well-balanced solo set.
I was merely drawing a perhaps inappropriate comparison to the theme of Nereffid's list, I guess. Steve does not call it so (though he certainly often travels in those circles and clearly some items "belong") - he doesn't attempt to label those albums as any particular genre, merely implying "new music" with his column name "Newer Music". Bright lines don't serve much purpose in these cases anyway.
Oh, wait, you mean the compiled page, don't you? Yes, that lags by 24 hours. The algebra is:
Compiled list + current day's post = total revealed as per the schedule.
I updated the compiled schedule about an hour ago.
/monies
Also, I was just reminded that I forgot to schedule my Favorite Non-Jazz of 2014, my Best of 2014 Reissues & Archival and my Best of 2013 (Revisited) posts. Those will now go up in January, no ETA yet.
Nank's post gets my vote for Best of Best of 2014 lists. What a list - if only there were some way to queue up all the videos and let them play all day!
I might have a couple side-lists to post soon, too. Every year I forget to post lists for stuff like Label of the Year, archival/reissues, etc. This year, I tried to get out in front of it and post them before my best of 2014 posts begin... but I forgot again. Usually by this point, I'm so sick of music and writing about music and thinking about writing or about music that I take a week off and just post videos or any reviews sitting in my pending file. But I think I'm gonna try to finish those posts off. I'm sort of babbling right now, aren't I?
I have 6 of Wondering Sound; it's a pretty good looking list though; a lot of variety. I hate to say it but I think I can see why emu ditched WS - it looks to have become legitimate music journalism rather than emu advertising; there's a lot on that list that isn't available at emu. That's not to criticize emu lists that were restricted to what they had. In the indie only days I loved their indie only lists; they were refreshing and different. Once the majors came, I liked their lists less; they just seemed to regurgitate other lists, but without so many important indies like 4AD, Matador and Merge. The worst for me was the best of 2000-2009, with Sony only of the majors, and missing some important indies. Looking at this years list makes me wish I'd paid more attention to WS and makes me sad it's gone.
Jonah, in your efforts to spin something up on your own, have you been in touch with any of the other writers/editors? Did emu fire Joe too? That would be an awful shame.
Some of the long reads on WS are really good. Kevin Whitehead's article on Albert Ayler immediately springs to mind, but there were others. There were also really fun reads like their column revisiting Beat Street, which included not only how that movie was turned into something the original creators hadn't envisioned, but also interviews with the actors and creators looking back upon it. Some of the comments on the emu forum express some serious ignorance about what a quality mag WS had become. There were some quality articles and writers hired to put that thing together. And, yeah, their whole thing was to gain complete independence from eMusic and exist on their own. But from the looks of it (and I have zero insider information on any of it), eMu decided to stop footing the bill before WS could find its own revenue stream. I do believe WS was on the verge of offering up advertising packages (or something like that), but that plan may have been killed by eMu pulling the rug out as quickly as they did. I mean, nobody is going to want to advertise on WS if all the news makes it look like WS is going down for the count. It is a shame.
For my own column, I'm going to be sending out a couple pitches next week. I have them written up, but I decided to wait until after the holidays to send them out. I know personally I'm so sick of listening to music and writing about it and doing anything with BitW, that even the idea of looking at my own inbox and reading review pitches is a huge turnoff to me right now... the end-of-year lists and prep and review really is exhausting... so I can only imagine that other people on other sites are feeling the same thing. So, next week, pitches begin going out.
I've also written up a draft of a script I'd use for a promo video if I do the crowdfunding thing. This weekend I'll be researching my options on how I would present my column if I were to do a subscription based thing (whether via crowdfunding or just as an option through my site). I've seen some of those 'zines, but I'm really not sure what all my options are. There's a lot I really don't know about this kind of thing, so I'm hoping that some wandering around the internet will clue me in to some options. But I like the idea of sending out a weekly newsletter/magazine page thing to subscribers... something that looks better than how my WS (and now on my own site) column looked. I'd want album covers, continue to use embedded audio, provide links to free tracks (when available), retail links, etc... but also be able to present the picks in different categories, too... here's all the Something Different albums, here's your late-night jazz club type albums, here's your straight-ahead old-school fan stuff... formatting options that are reader/user friendly that help people find the stuff they're looking for without just going one-by-one through a long list. But we'll see.
Hey, I should ask everyone here... if I were to do a subscription service, I need to come up with a price. I want to go a low-cost/high-volume route. I want to get the price so low that it falls in the sure-what-the-hell impulse purchase category, so that maybe I can get some readers who really don't look over the jazz scene but wouldn't mind receiving a weekly newsletter/whatever with some recs. Does ten dollars per year seem like too much? Too little? I want to do an annual subscription. I like the idea of $13/year, because then I can say my column only costs a quarter/week, but maybe $10/year is a better round number than $13. Any thoughts would be appreciated. I've received lots of emails and site comments from people saying they'd be happy to pay the $10/year to see my column going, but I figure if I'm going to make this work (and in order to spread the word about this music to a wide population), I need to appeal to people who figure, what the hell, I'll pay this guy a few dollars and see if he sends me any cool music.
I'm intrigued by the idea of doing my own thing with it, but if I were to find a reputable home for the column, with an accompanying regular source of income, that would be my favorite option for the time being. I just went through a divorce unfortunately and so I really would like to have as much reliability and steadiness and sameness in my life for a little while... I really was looking forward to just coasting for the next year as I get things together for life going forward. The WS thing happened at exactly the wrong time for me personally. That said, I feel awful for all the people who lost their full-time gig. Joe is still currently employed, but I'm sure he's not feeling too confident about how long that will be the case. I feel really bad for him about WS. Joe is totally passionate about music. I follow him on twitter and read some of his articles, and while I don't know 95% of the bands he's talking about or the venues he's going to, I just like reading his stuff, because, one, I learn about new things not in the jazz worlds, and two, I can totally relate to his passion for music. If I lived in NYC, I'd be doing the same thing... going to shows every night and spreading the word about the music I was hearing. And here he is, given the opportunity to actually have a full-time gig running an online music site to do the same thing he loves doing in his spare time, and to have the rug pulled out from under him before he was really able to get his dream running at full speed... that's gotta be disheartening. Crushing, really.
I kinda like $13 better than ten; I like odd prime numbers. Plus if it's $.25 per week you could always call it two bits from BITW.
Sorry to hear about your divorce. My wife and I are at the age where we're feeling surrounded by divorce, and it's a little scary and weird. But at least it beats the age where we're scanning the obits for acquaintances every day...
I would be quite happy with $10 or $13 Jonah, or even a bit more. Would you collect via PayPal - it would make it easier for those of us not in the Dollar zone. Sorry to hear about your news, hope life settles down for you soon.
Either amount would work for me. It's a bit hard to judge, because if you were a total stranger I don't know (not doubt, literally don't know) whether I would pay money at all for a jazz newsletter - I don't do that for anything else, don's subscribe to any magazines at all, print or digital. My life is too full of information regardless. But I have benefitted directly from your posts here and at WS, and on that basis could happily join in at the kind of level you mention, and would love to help you make something fly. I guess what I am saying is my vote is likely not representative of the outside world.
Sorry to hear about the divorce. I hope 2015 is a better year for you. In a non-linear way it makes me wonder how Bad Thoughts is doing...one of the things that sometimes bugs me about the Internet board thing is that you can talk to folk for years and then have no idea what is happening with them when they don't appear for a while. It feels kind of...irresponsible?...to be able to be that disconnected at the same time as being connected, if that makes any sense. Which loops me back to: I've enjoyed getting to know you and your ear for jazz a little and would chip in on a new venture.
Thanks for the kind words, everyone, and the feedback.
@GP - It's gonna be my biggest challenge... trying to get a sense of how to attract that people who have, one, never heard of me, and two, don't really listen to jazz.
I feel like if I can sweep up all the jazz fans who fit in category one, then that actually might be more than enough for me to go the subscription route. Obviously, though, I want to make a dent in that second category, too. Maybe if I focus on the first as I try to get the subscription thing going, and then once that's established, I can begin to focus on cat two. Hm, maybe.
It's tricky doing this with all the baggage and preconceptions of what Jazz is. I've got to go out there and say, yes, I'm going to rec a bunch of modern jazz to you, but wait, don't run away, because it's not really jazz, y'see? Well, except when it is, in fact, Jazz, but that's okay, because you might like that, too, but what you'll really like is the stuff that sounds more like the music you currently listen to, which isn't Jazz, and it sounds a lot like my music, which is Jazz... but not really.
If I can synthesize that down to a ten word sentence, I'm gold.
The only CD I own that I've seen on anybody's year-end list is the Old 97's Most Messed Up. It's their best in a long time, and the only 2014 release that I've listened to more than twice. I have downloaded the Parquet Courts and one of the Prince albums (Plectrum Electrum, which I like quite a bit.) Most of the other consensus Best of 2014 releases I've never even heard of.
I''m clueless, and OK with that. I had a good run.
Headphonecommute has a different approach to end of year lists, with multiple themes lists. Several of them are [url-http://reviews.headphonecommute.com/best-of-2014/]posted already[/url]. Plenty of overlap with my list here, including some of my near misses.
I've been looking forward to that JdJ/Roscoe/Threadgill disc since Sept 2013...They recorded it at Mike Reed's club, Constellation, when in town for the Jazz Fest. Also looking forward to seeing Vijay, also at Constellation, at the end of March!
A whole slew of interesting lists at A Closer Listen, broken down by mood and genre.
Also a list of the The 25 Best Winter Albums of All Time, of which I have a surprising number. Must come from living in Michigan.
The Brainwashed poll results.
I am still hoping that all the love for the A Winged Victory for the Sullen album in the charts closest to my tastes means that at some listening iteration I am going to hear why it's great myself.
Comments
It's probably no surprise to anyone that I think it's a great list . . . with some "must go for" albums (John Allemeier, Donnacha Dennehy,Meredith Monk and probably a few more)
And some already have's:
#2 Julia Wolfe - Steelhammer
#3 John Luther Adams - Become Ocean
#8 Tristan Perich & Vicky Chow - Surface Image
#9 Michael Gordon - Rushes
#13 Nicole Liz
I created an Rdio playlist of the six available there.
1. ANNE GUTHRIE
Codiaeum variegatum French-horn player, composer, and acoustician Guthrie leads a richly teeming, infinitely detailed imaginary journey through the secret lives of plants.
2. MICHAEL PISARO
Continuum Unbound Working with close collaborators across a span of three discs, Pisaro frames an untamed expanse of nature sounds, then proceeds to interject and interact deftly.
3. IAN WILLIAM CRAIG
A Turn of Breath Looping and layering strands of fragile voice, instruments, and ambient sounds, Craig fashions heart-rending one-man litanies.
4. KATE SOPER
Voices From the Killing Jar Sopers dramatic song cycle intertwines the tales of eight entrapped women from fiction and myth, voiced by the composer with lithe assurance and mordant bite.
5. PETER HAMMILL
. . . All That Might Have Been . . . At 66, the Van der Graaf Generator frontman issued what might be his most ambitious project, cutting and pasting songs into a seamless cinematic flow thats disorienting yet strangely alluring.
6. CHRIS CERRONE
Invisible Cities Eloquently performed by young LA opera company the Industry, Cerrones gorgeous, dreamlike setting of Italo Calvinos novel comes in an appropriately opulent package.
7. ANNA THORVALDSDOTTIR
Aerial Among the most exciting talents to emerge in recent years, Icelands Thorvaldsdottir found a new home for her elemental works on the venerable Deutsche Grammophon label.
8. BILL SEAMAN & JOHN SUPKO
s_traits Seaman, Supko, and their circuitry transform more than 100 hours of old tapes and aural detritus into a suite of perky, jittery miniatures, confounding and intoxicating at once.
9. DAVID SYLVIAN
Theres a Light That Enters Houses With No Other House in Sight Sylvians enigmatic sculpted improvisations align hauntingly with reflections on mortality from poet Franz Wrights Kindertotenwald, read by Wright with plainspoken finality.
10. KEIR NEURINGER
Ceremonies Out of the Air One man, one saxophone and still, a whole world of fine detail and dramatic sweep emerges in this imaginative, well-balanced solo set.
Oh, wait, you mean the compiled page, don't you? Yes, that lags by 24 hours. The algebra is:
Compiled list + current day's post = total revealed as per the schedule.
I updated the compiled schedule about an hour ago.
/monies
Also, I was just reminded that I forgot to schedule my Favorite Non-Jazz of 2014, my Best of 2014 Reissues & Archival and my Best of 2013 (Revisited) posts. Those will now go up in January, no ETA yet.
http://www.flopearedmule.net/music/favourites-2014/
Emusers
Other Music best of 2014
http://www.birdistheworm.com/best-of-2014/
I might have a couple side-lists to post soon, too. Every year I forget to post lists for stuff like Label of the Year, archival/reissues, etc. This year, I tried to get out in front of it and post them before my best of 2014 posts begin... but I forgot again. Usually by this point, I'm so sick of music and writing about music and thinking about writing or about music that I take a week off and just post videos or any reviews sitting in my pending file. But I think I'm gonna try to finish those posts off. I'm sort of babbling right now, aren't I?
Well, enjoy.
/monies
/you know it, baby. MONIES!
- I've got 1 (!) - The Aphex Twin album
http://www.wonderingsound.com/list/best-jazz-albums-of-2014/
0
Craig
Jonah, in your efforts to spin something up on your own, have you been in touch with any of the other writers/editors? Did emu fire Joe too? That would be an awful shame.
For my own column, I'm going to be sending out a couple pitches next week. I have them written up, but I decided to wait until after the holidays to send them out. I know personally I'm so sick of listening to music and writing about it and doing anything with BitW, that even the idea of looking at my own inbox and reading review pitches is a huge turnoff to me right now... the end-of-year lists and prep and review really is exhausting... so I can only imagine that other people on other sites are feeling the same thing. So, next week, pitches begin going out.
I've also written up a draft of a script I'd use for a promo video if I do the crowdfunding thing. This weekend I'll be researching my options on how I would present my column if I were to do a subscription based thing (whether via crowdfunding or just as an option through my site). I've seen some of those 'zines, but I'm really not sure what all my options are. There's a lot I really don't know about this kind of thing, so I'm hoping that some wandering around the internet will clue me in to some options. But I like the idea of sending out a weekly newsletter/magazine page thing to subscribers... something that looks better than how my WS (and now on my own site) column looked. I'd want album covers, continue to use embedded audio, provide links to free tracks (when available), retail links, etc... but also be able to present the picks in different categories, too... here's all the Something Different albums, here's your late-night jazz club type albums, here's your straight-ahead old-school fan stuff... formatting options that are reader/user friendly that help people find the stuff they're looking for without just going one-by-one through a long list. But we'll see.
Hey, I should ask everyone here... if I were to do a subscription service, I need to come up with a price. I want to go a low-cost/high-volume route. I want to get the price so low that it falls in the sure-what-the-hell impulse purchase category, so that maybe I can get some readers who really don't look over the jazz scene but wouldn't mind receiving a weekly newsletter/whatever with some recs. Does ten dollars per year seem like too much? Too little? I want to do an annual subscription. I like the idea of $13/year, because then I can say my column only costs a quarter/week, but maybe $10/year is a better round number than $13. Any thoughts would be appreciated. I've received lots of emails and site comments from people saying they'd be happy to pay the $10/year to see my column going, but I figure if I'm going to make this work (and in order to spread the word about this music to a wide population), I need to appeal to people who figure, what the hell, I'll pay this guy a few dollars and see if he sends me any cool music.
I'm intrigued by the idea of doing my own thing with it, but if I were to find a reputable home for the column, with an accompanying regular source of income, that would be my favorite option for the time being. I just went through a divorce unfortunately and so I really would like to have as much reliability and steadiness and sameness in my life for a little while... I really was looking forward to just coasting for the next year as I get things together for life going forward. The WS thing happened at exactly the wrong time for me personally. That said, I feel awful for all the people who lost their full-time gig. Joe is still currently employed, but I'm sure he's not feeling too confident about how long that will be the case. I feel really bad for him about WS. Joe is totally passionate about music. I follow him on twitter and read some of his articles, and while I don't know 95% of the bands he's talking about or the venues he's going to, I just like reading his stuff, because, one, I learn about new things not in the jazz worlds, and two, I can totally relate to his passion for music. If I lived in NYC, I'd be doing the same thing... going to shows every night and spreading the word about the music I was hearing. And here he is, given the opportunity to actually have a full-time gig running an online music site to do the same thing he loves doing in his spare time, and to have the rug pulled out from under him before he was really able to get his dream running at full speed... that's gotta be disheartening. Crushing, really.
Wow, this is a really long post.
Sorry to hear about your divorce. My wife and I are at the age where we're feeling surrounded by divorce, and it's a little scary and weird. But at least it beats the age where we're scanning the obits for acquaintances every day...
Sorry to hear about the divorce. I hope 2015 is a better year for you. In a non-linear way it makes me wonder how Bad Thoughts is doing...one of the things that sometimes bugs me about the Internet board thing is that you can talk to folk for years and then have no idea what is happening with them when they don't appear for a while. It feels kind of...irresponsible?...to be able to be that disconnected at the same time as being connected, if that makes any sense. Which loops me back to: I've enjoyed getting to know you and your ear for jazz a little and would chip in on a new venture.
@GP - It's gonna be my biggest challenge... trying to get a sense of how to attract that people who have, one, never heard of me, and two, don't really listen to jazz.
I feel like if I can sweep up all the jazz fans who fit in category one, then that actually might be more than enough for me to go the subscription route. Obviously, though, I want to make a dent in that second category, too. Maybe if I focus on the first as I try to get the subscription thing going, and then once that's established, I can begin to focus on cat two. Hm, maybe.
It's tricky doing this with all the baggage and preconceptions of what Jazz is. I've got to go out there and say, yes, I'm going to rec a bunch of modern jazz to you, but wait, don't run away, because it's not really jazz, y'see? Well, except when it is, in fact, Jazz, but that's okay, because you might like that, too, but what you'll really like is the stuff that sounds more like the music you currently listen to, which isn't Jazz, and it sounds a lot like my music, which is Jazz... but not really.
If I can synthesize that down to a ten word sentence, I'm gold.
/monies
Craig
I''m clueless, and OK with that. I had a good run.
I've been looking forward to that JdJ/Roscoe/Threadgill disc since Sept 2013...They recorded it at Mike Reed's club, Constellation, when in town for the Jazz Fest. Also looking forward to seeing Vijay, also at Constellation, at the end of March!
Also a list of the The 25 Best Winter Albums of All Time, of which I have a surprising number. Must come from living in Michigan.
Amazingly well over 1,500 albums got points.
Almost as amazingly, 4 of my top 5 are in the poll's top 5.
Craig
I am still hoping that all the love for the A Winged Victory for the Sullen album in the charts closest to my tastes means that at some listening iteration I am going to hear why it's great myself.