Four CDs and a DVD.

So I just got back from Tower Records, and I guess I’m in my general-music-fan phase. Which means that I’m devouring music from every time and place except, usually, the current time. The Maestropolis stuff is only one side of my musical interest; most of a year is spent, for me, listening to music made before I was born, or at least before I listened to music with any attention.

The four CDs I bought today are:

Everything Is Possible, an Os Mutantes compilation put out by David Byrne’s Luka Bop label. Maybe it’s just my impression that Os Mutantes are starting to get the sort of widespread of-course-they’re-important attention that, say, Can and the Velvet Underground have enjoyed for a couple decades now, but my curiosity has just now reached the proper pitch of pique.

Flying Funk, a Northern Soul-at-the-intersection-of-funk-and-jazz compilation, because a record containing both Nina Simone and Gil Scott-Heron has just got to be interesting, though my interest cooled slightly when I read the liner notes and realized that its roots are in the acid jazz movement, which I’ve always thought had a cooler name than the music actually deserved.

Mott the Hoople, that band’s first record, which I’ve wanted desperately for a long time, but which was reiussed in the U.S. last year to such little fanfare that I only discovered it by accident today. It’s glorious Stonesy stuff, with enough musical limitation that it could be considered a precursor of punk: if that’s the kind of thing you need to hear in order to enjoy plain old-fashioned rock & roll.

And a Philadelphia Orchestra recording of Beethoven’s 3rd Symphony, the “Eroica,” because last night I re-read one of my favorite recent pieces of music writing (it was a travesty that it was left out of the Best American Music Writing 2005 anthology), an essay called “Listen to This” by Alex Ross (the music critic, not the kitsch superhero painter) in the Feb 16-23, 2004 issue of the New Yorker. Here’s Ross:

I don’t identify with the listener who responds to the “Eroica” by saying, “Ah, civilization.” That wasn’t what Beethoven wanted: his intention was to shake the European mind. I don’t listen to music to be civilized; sometimes, I listen precisely to escape the ordered world. What I love about the “Eroica” is the way it manages to have it all, uniting Romanticism and Enlightenment, civilization and revolution, brain and body, order and chaos. It knows which way you think the music is going and veers triumphantly in the wrong direction.

And,

For many, popular music is the soundtrack of raging adolescence, while the other kind chimes in during the long twilight of maturity. For me, it’s the reverse. Listening to the “Eroica” reconnects me with a kind of childlike energy, a happy ferocity about the world. Since I came to pop music late, I invest it with more adult feeling. To me, it’s penetrating, knowing, full of microscopic shades of truth about the way things really are. Dylan’s “Blood on the Tracks” anatomizes a doomed relationship with a saturnine clarity that a canonical work such as “Die Schöne Müllerin” can't match. . . . If I were in a perverse mood, I’d say that the “Eroica” is the raw, thuggish thing — a blast of ego and id — whereas a song like Radiohead’s “Everything in Its Right Place” is all cool adult irony.

And,

When people hear “classical,” they think “dead.” The music is described in terms of its distance from the present, its resistance to the mass — what it is not. You see magazines with listings for Popular Music in one section and for Classical Music in another, so that the latter becomes, by implication, Unpopular Music. No wonder that stories of its imminent demise are so commonplace.

Ross is writing for a New Yorker audience — an audience he can safely assume has some interest in classical music. But they can also be the “ah, civilization” folks, and he gives a hilariously merciless description of a classical novice’s attempt to attend a performance of the 3rd Symphony in which the people who take it seriously are the ones who get in the way of the actual music.

So, anyway, I figured I’d give the “Eroica” a shot, armed in advance with both Ross’s description of the music’s primal power and his warnings about how it takes a while to get it. I’ve been listening to the local classical station off-and-on (it’s the default station when I take a CD out of my car stereo), and I’m starting to get seriously interested in the music. But this will make only the second classical CD, after a Gershwin’s Greatest Hits that I’ve owned; and there’s so much non-classical ground left for me to cover, too. It’ll take a while, probably.

The other day I got a DVD called Cavalcade of Comedy, issued by those wonderful humanitarians at Kino Video. Its subtitle is The Paramount Comedy Shorts 1929-1933, and it has eighteen short films starring some of the last great vaudeville acts, including Jack Benny, Burns and Allen, Eddie Cantor, Bing Crosby, George Jessel, and Smith & Dale. This was the generation that stepped from the stage to radio (and then to television), and they’re usually the ones whose names are listed when anyone wants to point out how cool vaudeville was. But the history of vaudeville is so much richer (and, duh, older) than that, and it’s a shame that sound didn’t come in early enough to capture Montgomery & Stone, Fields & Weber, Williams & Walker, Elsie Janis, Sophie Tucker, or Norah Bayes at their prime. (Though, as a silent-film fan, for me the coming of sound has its downside too.)

Anyway, just wanted to mention that vaudeville was not just a bunch of sitcom stars. When I dip back into a book called No Applause, Just Throw Money: the Book that Made Vaudeville Famous, I’ll be talking about some more of the phenomenon.