Man, there’s still quite a few I want to get to, especially to highlight bands I haven’t yet. But I’m gonna stick with another funny one for now.
music is music but we hear it in context and with this one I’m gonna try to set the scene a little. Two centuries after Bach died it was WW2 and the Germans were bombing the marmite out of England during the blitz, and at some point the city of London declared an official cultural blackout, meaning that to limit mass casualties during the air raids the British government closed all the galleries & museums & theaters. We’ve sure had a bad year and maybe for the beginning we could have even related a little, like how last March felt so shaky and so charged, but that’s it because for example tomorrow morning outside my window I’ll hear the mailtruck and some jingling dog leashes and a few ravens across the street, while in london they heard moaning sirens and a maniac sky and the muffled drums of distant bombs and even the silences sounded like a deletion. And then when they walked around the next morning all the buildings and tables and tablecloths in the neighborhood that they’d been walking between and flirting over just three months ago were increasingly a mist of hovering dust and diagonal jenga, not to mention that every time they wandered down the street to buy six eggs they had to try to not wonder about the neighbors they hadn’t heard from this week or the nephew who’d been in Italy since spring. My point is that it was a murky, punishing time and their wifi connection probably wasn’t that hot either, so in addition to zero sports and zero internet porn their entire art world was now shut down too. When I see black-and-white photographs of 1940 london I can’t picture the colors
anyway at some point a female british pianist Myra Hess decided to organize impromptu classical music recitals; she got a grand piano wheeled into london’s National Gallery art museum and put on free concerts. They were super popular. And there you are, rubbing your eyes after another night of halfsleep and pulling yourself together and burning two eggs because you haven’t had butter since summer bank holiday then tugging on your boots and trudging through that pulverised grey moonscape to go to a…classical music concert? then seeing the museum and clonking up the steps and following the crowd and finding some chair in a corner and sitting and waiting until a musician waddles in and sits in front of a piano and then silence and then—huh? a curve of music from outer space melting and unspooling itself in a room that is suddenly floating suspended in time, but is somehow still also menaced on all sides by that wrecked city? Ooo I actually can’t imagine it, I would have sat there and heard the first five notes and I would have shattered into a zillion pieces. What could it have felt like to be sitting there and to feel grace in a group of humans for an hour? Once in the middle of a concert a a bomb blasted through a ceiling twenty feet away, so they moved to the basement. These were the best musicians on earth playing free concerts wearing clumsy coats and hats and heating their hands and their clarinets on a literal stove, and I still can’t shake the image that the whole time a hundred yards outside the walls was humanity at its berserk worst, at its most disgraced and heartbroken, dismal machines on fire in the sky, the sky hanging from a hinge, while inside this little place are a bunch of neighbors doing worship for the sake of beauty and Bach and pride and mission. They broadcast those concerts on the radio and as the city disintegrated thousands of londoners ultimately took shelter in the tube, and always in my imagination everyone in those sunken concrete caverns is huddled around a radio listening and I’ll bet the air smelled like feet and kerosene and I’m sure they were afraid all the time
oh man sorry guys I’ve had a very long day and got way carried away, my bad. And the whole reason I said “Bach” is bc the piece that became the emblem of those concerts is my J:
J is for Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring, which originally appeared in Cantata #147 “Herz un Mund und Tat und Leben,” as the tenth movement, a chorale titled “Jesu bleibet meine Freude”.
–here’s Dame Myra Hess playing her own piano transcription; this is what they wouldve heard
–and here’s the original music more or less as Bach wrote it in 1723
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Tough to choose among my remaining options. I’ll go with one from an artist I expected to see a little more of so far.
Post YT videos amigo. Just copy/paste.
Live version below
Told ya I wasn’t done with delta blues 
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Well I’ll sneak a little lesser-known one from a lesser-known indie band in here.
Kicking off Ks with a classic
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A behemoth of a song.
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Double points for 2 K’s
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My favorite Boston club band of the 80s and 90s. I wish I could find a better recording or the studio version, but it appears that this is the only version loaded to YouTube. It’s still good but doesn’t completely capture how raw they really sounded. David Minahan is a sick vocalist and guitarist. One of the few I ever saw that could do really technical solos while singing.
This album (Perfect Strangers) was released well after all their classic albums, but it was like they didn’t miss a beat in the intervening years. Saw this tour live and they killed it.
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This is a rag by Blind Willie McTell. One of my favorite blues players.
eta: I saw Todd Albright play this song live last year.
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The best song ever written, at least according to the guy who wrote it. Despite Ian McCullogh’s annoying arrogance, this song is pretty good.
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I actually prefer:
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I prefer this:
K is probably the weakest letter in my playlists so far
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