For a while, the blogroll in the left sidebar contained a category called “The Trinity.” It listed the web sites for Jackson Browne, Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen, my three favorite male recording artists. A couple months ago I was switching off CDs from the house to my vehicle and, for some reason, wondered if that belief was reflected in my CDs. Thus, I went through them and totaled up how many I had from various artists.

Before getting into it, there are a couple qualifiers. First, the counts may not be wholly accurate, what with a couple vehicles and at least one stereo system on each of the three floors of the house. Second, the count is by title, not number of CDs. Thus, a multi-CD release counts the same as one CD. Finally, the count also includes bootlegs, not just studio or authorized live recordings

That said, the numbers confirmed that Browne, Dylan and Springsteen are my musical holy trinity. I have 36 Dylan releases, 24 Springsteen ones (which includes solo and E Street Band) and 22 Browne titles. There are also probably the three artists for whom I have the most bootlegs.

The numbers also surprised me a bit. For example, I wouldn’t have guessed that I had more Neil Young (18), Santana (16), Chicago (14) and Clapton (14) releases than Beatles (12), although the Beatles count doesn’t include any solo releases. I was even more surprised to discover I have as many releases by Grand Funk as the Rolling Stones (10 each).

The results of my jazz collection wasn’t too surprising either. The problem with it is the various combinations. For example, do you count Return to Forever with Chick Corea? Does Cannonball & Coltrane count for both or, if not, for which? Using what was undoubtedly a completely capricious and inconsistent method of counting, the leaders didn’t really surprise me.

I had 19 releases by both Chick Corea and Pat Metheny, my two favorite modern jazz artists. Also not surprising was that Bill Evans was next at 17, followed by Miles with 14. As for Cannonball and Coltrane? Eleven each, although I still have no clue which way I counted the joint CD.

So, not only were my beliefs sustained, it seems the Trinity are pretty well permanently enshrined on my CD shelves.

Bruce Springsteen

This year’s recordings, in fact, led me to somewhat modify one of the rules I’ve used in the past in selecting my favorites of the year. I usually don’t consider live albums because they tend to be contain almost exclusively previously released music. Yet this year my three favorite albums were live recordings. Applying the rule’s intent led to my favorite album being selected somewhat by default — but that in no way means it wasn’t at the top of the list anyway.

Five Peace Band Live isn’t excluded by the live album rule because this is not a band that released prior recordings. Rather this two-CD set comes from a series of 2008 European concerts by Chick Corea, John McLaughlin, Christian McBride, Kenny Garrett, and Vinnie Colaiuta. Bitches Brew and Corea would go on to form Return to Forever while McLaughlin would head up the Mahavishnu Orchestra. This album has a sense of each of those bands while Kenny Garrett’s exceptional sax work gives a feel for Weather Report. For whatever reason, Garrett had not previously crossed my radar — at least to my knowledge — and this CD makes me a big fan.

The music on album is among the best fusion I’ve heard in years. Yet it doesn’t stop there. Along the way the band provides some excellent traditional, bop, post-bop and even free jazz moments. I don’t have any qualms saying it contains some stunning performances and music. The CD is among the nominees for the Grammy Award for best instrumental jazz album. From my perspective, it was and is a thoroughly enjoyable slice of elements of jazz that enthrall me.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the two other albums that were top contenders but fell subject to the previously recorded rule.

One is Live from Madison Square Garden by Eric Clapton and Steve Winwood. This arguably could have qualified for an exception because although the music was previously released, the only band in which Clapton and Winwood performed and released music together was 1969′s “supergroup,” Blind Faith.

Live from Madison Square Garden is deserving of recognition in a couple respects. First, of course, is the quality of the performances. If anyone wonders if Clapton or Winwood have lost any of their chops over the years, a listen to this two-CD set will dispel any questions. Second, the performance includes most of the songs from the Blind Faith album, strongly reminding a listener of the strength of their songwriting even 40 years ago. In fact, the performance of “Can’t Find My Way Home” on this CD has a Grammy nomination for best rock performance by a duo or group with vocals. Finally, once you throw in some Traffic, Derek & the Dominoes and solo release material and then top it off with great renditions of Jimi Hendrix’s “Little Wing” and “Voodoo Chile,” it’s hard not to love this album. It quite deservedly garnered a nomination for the Grammy Award for best rock album.

The third live album I loved this year was clearly disqualified by my prior release rule. Return to Forever gathered for a reunion tour and ultimately released Returns, a two-CD set of music from that tour.

Return to Forever is perhaps my favorite fusion band of all time. In fact, their concert at Orchestra Hall in Minneapolis in (probably) 1976 remains to this day one of the best concerts I have seen. I was utterly amazed at not only their talent but the ability of four individuals to generate so much and such powerful music. Much of the music I heard at that concert appears on this release and the talent is plainly still there. Because the tunes were previously released, I considered it ineligible for my album of the year. But the music remains so superb and well-performed that it would be wrong not to include it in looking back at my year in music.

In light of what made my “best of” list this year, there’s one other thing I should mention in looking back at the year. I thought about but didn’t get to either the Clapton-Winwood or the Return to Forever performances in Omaha. It just goes to show that regardless of how excellent the music may be, the listener can make decisions he or she will come to regret.

Chick Corea on the Five Peace Band (Nov. 3, 2008)

The concept behind But Beautiful is not unique in and of itself. First published in 1991 and out in a new trade paper edition, it consists of essays about jazz greats Lester “Pres” Young, Thelonius Monk, Bud Powell, Ben Webster, Charlie Mingus, Chet Baker and Art Pepper, with an overarching piece on Duke Ellington traveling between gigs and his songwriting. In execution, though, it is “about jazz” unlike any other book.

The combination of technical and artistic aspects makes any genre of music hard to write about and leaves little doubt that the variously attributed statement that it’s like “dancing about architecture” is absolutely true. And it’s hard to find a genre with a more complex architecture than jazz, thereby increasing the difficulty of describing it. Dyer, however, does so with sentences that are often strikingly simple yet go right to the heart of the music. For example:

• Monk “played each note as though astonished by the previous one,” often leaving the feeling that “the song seemed to have turned inside out.”
• Mingus’s “bass marched everyone along like a bayonet in a prisoner’s back.”
• “Every time [Baker] played a note he waved it goodbye. Sometimes he didn’t even wave.”

These phrases exquisitely describe an aspect of each musician’s style. Yet the descriptions leave the initiated nodding their head while still giving the uninitiated a sense of the nature of the music. And Dyer also provides longer expositions, such as this passage describing Pepper playing his alto sax while sitting in a prison cell:

For a few moments he falters, oblivious to what he is playing, clutching the eight and ninth rungs of the count. Then, summoning everything, he searches for the highest note, reaches it — just — and soars clear. At the height of this leap, before gravity reasserts itself, there is a moment of absolute weightlessness — bright, clear, serene — before he is falling again, gliding in a gorgeous arc, subsiding into the deep moan of the blues. And the convicts realize that’s what it’s been about all along — a dream of falling.

In a paragraph, Dyer has taken us inside a few seconds of improvisation and both the emotions that helped create it and those it itself created. This is far from the only example in But Beautiful, named after a jazz standard. Over the course of roughly a page, Dyer describes Baker’s style in a way that is nearly as transcendent as its subject.

Yet this alone isn’t what makes the book superb. But Beautiful is a form of literary jazz.

Jazz artists borrow, build upon and expand idioms or concepts of their predecessors and contemporaries. There’s a heavy element of creativity and improvisation as they often go inside a melody to explore, deconstruct or transform it. That is what Dyer does on paper. He seeks the heart of the musicians and their music, blending anecdotes, apocrypha, books and, to a great extent, even photos although only one appears in this edition). Dyer synthesizes these elements into impressionistic essays, something he calls “imaginative criticism.”

Each essay is an extended solo on one artist, at times heavily blues-based. There’s Young awakening to grab a silent phone he thinks is ringing, “expecting to hear someone break the news to him that he had died in his sleep.” There’s Bud Powell, who was “always potentially out of control but now that potential had been unleashed.” But Beautiful explores the toll of genuis and the highs, lows and decimations of people like Powell, Pepper and Baker in ways normal storytelling cannot. But it is not all the ravages of booze, heroin and incarceration. There’s Monk’s inimitable style and him calling his wife Ellie in the middle of a song, leaving the phone off the hook so she can hear what he was playing for her. There’s the creativity and volatility of “Minus, Mingus, Mingus — not a name but a verb, even thought was a form of action, of internalized momentum.” There’s Ellington in a car Harry Carney, a 45-year member of Ellington’s band. As Carney drives, Ellington ponders music and writes songs.

These are just a few of “a whole bunch of guys whose stories and thoughts are not like anyone else’s who wouldn’t have had a chance to express all the ideas and shit they had inside them without jazz.” Dyer’s evocative perceptions of them and their music make But Beautiful “about jazz” in a way that transcends those two words.

Geoff Dyer, But Beautiful: A Book About Jazz