A reason why to often not put much emphasis on whether or not a person is right about what they think about a record: if we're interested in understanding why the record is important to them, why it's meaningful, how it affects them, then often the "wrong" things that they think are just as or more important than the "right" ones. If I hear a record as sad, quibbling with me over whether or not I am really experiencing sadness or some other more subtle or esoteric emotion because of some independent characterization you can give of the music ("when listening objectively others agree that this record sounds reservedly hopeful") seems to implicitly denigrate its importance for me.

The other week a student (a conducting major I think) in my philosophy of music seminar asked me to list my favorite records. I actually tried to list them - in the past year or two I have tried to avoid doing so. But I mostly just tried to recall what I put down the last time I wrote a list (this one here I think). I did a poor job, but adequate I suppose. I think I might have said these: The Curtain Hits the Cast, Kind of Blue and Bitches Brew, Crescent, Emergency & I, Change, Music for 18 Musicians, the Musical Offering with Neville Mariner and the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, and I think Outkast. The thing I am most disappointed at leaving off is 69 Love Songs, because I have been thinking about and listening to them a lot lately.

He said it was a broad range of stuff. Oh, it gets broader.

Sometimes I aspire to have this blog be a kind of improvisation.

But maybe it's more like the kind of improvisation on the Monk track from the Riverside box where you can hear him practicing "Round Midnight" in the studio for about twenty minutes. He's improvising, but it's not for a record or a performance, so he gives himself more opportunities to test things, to start over, to double back.

If you think of records as (at least tentative or provisional or suggested) answers to questions, then one question for Emperor Tomato Ketchup - at least at times - might be "How much can a record sound like a rock record while being as fundamentally non-rock as possible?"

(Dots and Loops seems to me to not care about answering that question.)

I always lean in closer when "The Drum Thing" comes on on Crescent. It has something to do with the way Coltrane articulates his phrases - maybe it constantly seems to court fading away completely, not just at the beginnings and ends of phrases but during them too.

I'm not clear enough on the details of Deleuze's position (described below) to know whether what I'm going to suggest would better be thought of as another sort of image of thought, or a particular kind of thought in the image of problem solving or encounters with the unknown, as he advocates. But anyway.

This idea of an image of thought seems helpful along with this idea I mentioned, about taking improvisation in music more seriously in order to help better understand improvisation in other contexts. I had in mind very wide-ranging contexts: writing a paper, teaching a class, finding your way to a new place, talking with a new person, talking with a person you've known for a long time, cooking, making a mixtape, packing your suitcase for a trip, listening to a new record, listening to an old record, reading, friendship, love. This is not to say that these cannot be done in non-improvisatory, or less improvisatory, ways. Or that there are not degrees. For some it may be better, in certain circumstances, and for certain goals or criteria, to plan them out more. For some, planning seems to be of extremely limited use, and sometimes harmful or at least inhibiting. All can be done improvisationally. I think that doing them this way may often make them work out better, or negotiate unforseen problems more readily. Often when we do them and unforseen problems do arise, we do improvise. But I think we often do so unreflectively, or regard the improvisation as something we would rather not have to do. A better understanding of how improvisation works might make it seem more central, more vital, might help us recognize the ways it's always there, even if in a sort of suppressed form.

I especially have in mind a picture of improvisation like Paul Berliner's in Thinking in Jazz, which I am unfortunately not able to give an apt summation of at the moment. But the emphasis he puts on a couple things seems key. His book is organized following the life path of an improviser: background conditions and musical knowledge the improviser brings to the practice, the way the improviser learns to improvise initially by learning from other musicians and trying for themselves, the way the improviser's technique develops over time in response to their continued attention and interaction with other musicians. Also, Berliner does well making the resources that improvisers have to draw on seem - I don't know, real, thick somehow, making it clear that it's nothing as naive as "they just get up and play whatever they want", while also not slipping into "they just figure out a bunch of riffs to play beforehand". Elements of improvisation like these seem to have direct analogues in the activities above, and emphasizing their importance in musical improvisation is important if the activities are to be meaningfully described as improvisation, since our typical understandings of them seem to often involve drawing on a store or reserve or experience that somehow guides us aside from the contingencies introduced by the improvisational context, and the idea that somehow we can get better at them over time while still never mastering them.

Paul Patton from Deleuze & the Political, on p. 19, in the section on "the dogmatic image of thought":

Deleuze objects that recognition offers a timid conception of thought which draws its exemplars from among the most banal acts of everyday thinking: 'this is a table, this is an apple ... good morning Theaetetus ... who can believe that the destiny of thought is at stake in these acts ...?'. In opposition to this model, he argues that it is not the reassuring familiarity of the known which should provide us with the paradigm of thinking, but those hesitant gestures which accompany our encounters with the unknown. Examples that point to an alternative model of thought may be found in Plato, when he draws attention to the responses of the subject of contradictory perceptions which 'provoke thought to reconsideration', or in Heidegger, where he points to the situation of someone learning to swim. Apprenticeship or learning may be contrasted with recognition at every point: it is an involuntary activity which need not involve the application of a method. Apprenticeship is not the natural exercise of a faculty but something to which we are driven by necessity or puzzlement, in any case by the perception of a problem. The antithesis of thought in this case is not an error but the failure adequately to perceive a problem or the inadequate specification of the dimensions of a problem which confronts us - in other words, stupidity.

More on this rock/beats thing: if I follow the distinction here that Tim and I were arguing about with respect to the Dismemberment Plan and (perhaps not coincidentally - remember Peter Scholtes' line about them) the Talking Heads between giving up to the grove or, er, not, then I am saying something like this: on Dots and Loops Stereolab are giving up to the groove, and on their other records they are not.

It's a very sort of sophisticated, reserved (?) giving up to the groove, but at least by comparison...

Another interesting thing to reinforce this rock/beats dichotomy: when I listen to Dots and Loops, even though there are lots of organs and analog synths and stuff (or at least things that sound like them) on the record, I don't really hear the music as having them; versus say Emperor Tomato Ketchup or others, where when I hear them I'm like "hey listen to that synth". (And then I make farting noises with my mouth.)

Even the horns, which there are many of, don't seem like horns to me. Perhaps because they do not seem deployed as horns, and likewise the synths do not seem deployed as synths. They're deployed as sounds.

But lots of the bass parts, the ones that seem to at least derive originally from a real person plucking a real bass guitar (I am aware of the presence of looping, electronic production, synths etc., although sometimes only in the most limited sense that I have been informed they are in there somewhere), I still hear as "bass guitar parts", where I mean by that something like "things like the bass guitar parts in any other music that has a bass guitar". Like, er, rock music.