The nice thing is that every note sounds like a really good idea. I mean, when I'm sober the notes still sound like good ideas but now they sound like really good ideas, really really. Can I say another 'really'? Yeah.

Even the dumb little twinkly notes at the end of this song.

I know that properly to avoid being an indie caricature I should be saying this about AOR schlock or a Christina Aguilera song or something, but man this Gastr del Sol sounds beautiful right now. (The Christina Aguilera and Avril Lavigne songs I heard tonight sounded beautiful too, but then pretty much everything I heard today sounded beautiful, including ahem here this is for you Jeff Blind Willie Johnson. How great is that?)

You know what is possibly slightly freaky when you are really drunk, is that Gastr del Sol record, "Blues Subtitled Untitled" or whatever it's called. Jesus, is is possible to keep things balanced in each channel instead of flittering back and forth? Perhaps it is not.

The Bad Plus (a piano trio including Minneapolis-based Happy Apple drummer David King) have released a new record, their major-label debut, These Are the Vistas, on Columbia. It has seven originals (not all new to this release) and three covers, of "Smells Like Teen Spirit", "Heart of Glass", and Aphex Twin's "Flim".

All the songs have liner notes (supplied by the band, as far as I can tell). The notes for the Nirvana and Blondie songs are related. Nirvana: "An enormous hit lovingly deconstructed." Blondie: "An enormous hit ruthlessly deconstructed." It's interesting, then, how similar the two covers are. I would say that neither original is especially harmonically rich. I'm not sure whether or not this need be a serious problem for a jazz-inclined cover; bop covers of "simple" pop tunes of the day often solved it by simply dispensing quickly with the melody. However, this is not a bop record. Though they play through more of the melody to "Teen Spirit", they ultimately end up treating the melody that accompanies the albino/mulatto lines as a melodic and rhythmic cell. Much the same happens with Debbie Harry's opening phrases in "Heart". But unlike something like Brad Mehldau's cover of Nick Drake's "River Man", where the cell is transformed, manipulated, basically treated as an object of composition via improvisation, here I just get the impression that the cells are being thrown around a bit. In that sense, there's not much separating the two covers. Perhaps I have high expectations for "deconstructed" covers, but the major distinctions between the two seem to be these: the Nirvana cover is played through a bit more completely (and, as I've read, it's like sad or something, hmm where have I heard of that trick before), and the Blondie cover is broken apart by a big noisy section before they stop fucking around with the rhythm and just go all-out disco. (The note for the song continues: "Is the long vamp (before the final drum salutation) joyful or tragic?") These don't seem like strong enough differences to warrant one song's being "lovingly" deconstructed, while the other is "ruthlessly" so. The Nirvana cover is more or less straight - including the "intense" bits - and the Blondie cover is too, if you consider the freakout in the middle to be confusing, instead of exhibiting a lack of mercy for the original (for its... what? integrity? unity? emotional tenor? substance?).

The cover of "Flim" does not share the flaw of insufficiently tarting up the original's melody. It's nice, straightforward, direct, kind of like the band's original, "Everywhere You Turn", which I first mistook for the Aphex Twin cover since it had been years since I played the original. But it raises its own questions, questions that many of the songs might also raise. When the music is performed live, on traditional jazz instruments (also, in the notes, someone is careful to add: "there are no edits or overdubs on this record"), but many of the usual hallmarks of jazz are gone, and the music starts sounding more and more like translations of electronic music into a live-performance setting, what are the reasons for listening to music like this as opposed to something else? For performing it? Now, as far as I know the record doesn't claim to be a jazz record, exactly. There are reasons for thinking of it in relation to the jazz tradition, and reasons for thinking of it apart from that tradition. Perhaps sorting through those will help me figure out why I might want to listen to this record as opposed to my Aphex Twin records and Miles Davis records (separately).

So I thought, earlier, that I might lie down and do that careful listening, like-meditation thing again, with the third movement of the op. 132 quartet. But by the time I got around to bed, that seemed like an awful lot of work, which reminded me that it is work, despite the idea (maybe true) that meditation is supposed to be relaxing in some way.

So I didn't do it. But I ended up staying awake for another couple of hours, and now I feel bitter, irritated, and bleak (mysteriously - probably not from just having stayed up longer).

So suddenly it seems worthwhile again to listen carefully before bed, because of what it has to offer me.

Of course, the album track / single distinction might be key for the stuff below about whether one should write off commercial rap.

Recent revelations about Dirty:

"This part is kind of annoying but I still like it."

"This part is kind of scary but I still like it."

"This part is kind of dumb but I still like it."

Recent revelations about Dots and Loops:

"Oh, there are strings on this album!"

"No, wait, maybe those are synths, but who cares?

"These are definitely strings, I forgot about them too."

"So the earlier ones were strings, I bet."

"Oh wow, this whole part is in 5/4."

"Oh wow, when I count this in four, this part of the beat stays on but this other one shifts."

"Oh wow, this is in 6/8 or some other meter like that that I never really learned how to count in school."

"The drum machine bit here is actually fascinating instead of boring, I wonder what happened?"

I found myself surprised tonight at just how violent some parts of the third section ("Heiliger Dankgesang eines Genesenen an die Gottheit, in der lydischen Tonart: Molto adagio - Andante") of Beethoven's op. 132 string quartet sound. (In my head, and I think on paper, this is overwhelmingly the "slow" and "pretty" section. Also "deep" and "beautiful" and "sublime" et cetera. But before that "sublime" gives you any ideas, get your mind out of the Enlightenment-era shit-thunder-is-scary-man gutter.)