I don’t do resolutions and I’ve pretty much given up on reading challenges. But I did come up with a couple projects for the year over the holidays.
One has to do with the perpetual “to read” stacks in various parts of the house. As part of some changes in our bedroom, I moved in a much bigger bookshelf than I had in there before. My goal is to make that the official “to read” bookshelf. I hope that by centralizing them, it may lead me to follow through on past intentions of making sure I try and read one of those books before I get a new book. I don’t know if it will succeed but at least all of them will be in one location.
The other I could have accomplished in other fashions but opted for a way that called for a new “toy”. Two things came together for this. First, I have a CD case I guess contains at least 400 jazz CDs. (I am defining jazz a bit loosely as the CDs include some “New Age’ pianists and guitarists and a bit of so-called smooth jazz.) Meanwhile, I have a pair of JBL L-100 Century speakers. Although the foam grilles disintegrated, I remain of the opinion that these are among the finest home audio speakers ever manufactured.
Putting the two together, I told my wife she could get me a 300-disc CD changer for Christmas, which she did. I am filling the changer only with CDs from the jazz rack. Using a random number generator, my goal is to listen to every one of those 300 CDs over the course of the year. Best of all, both are in the room off our bedroom that has four huge built-in bookshelves and my home PC. I have now named it “the jazz room.”
There will be some exceptions to its jazz only rule. My kids bought me a turntable for Christmas with a USB connection and software so that I can easily convert vinyl to CD. Thus, I am also going to be revisiting my several hundred LP vinyl collection and create digital versions of albums I haven;t yet found on CD.
Jazz is not dead, it just smells funny.
Frank Zappa, “Be-Bop Tango,” Roxy & Elsewhere
