November 2024

Try An Alternative: Hip-Hop To Ranchera!
A new kind of music program to expand your listening pleasures.
Article By Roger Skoff

Arctic Outpost Radio AM 1270
Spinning 78 rpm shellacs (1902 to 1958) from the top of the world.

  What kind of music do you listen to? Whatever comes on the radio? A particular favorite? Rock? Classical? Blues? Gospel? House? Country and Western? Alternative? Pop? Tech? Doo-Wop? Jazz? Rhythm & Blues? Folk? Ethnic? (What kind of ethnic?) Dixieland? Big band? Marching Band? Garage band? Another kind, entirely? Or many different kinds?

Music is probably – maybe even before smearing marks on cave walls – humanity's oldest art form. As long as we have had voices, we have sung – or at least made rhythmic noises. And if something was handy that we could bang on, we – even from earliest times – did bang on it, or clapped, or snapped our fingers, or did something musical, either individually or together, to pass the time, to express our emotions, to inspire our emotions, to wake us up or put us to sleep, to keep us all working, marching, or praying together, or to cheer us up or comfort us when we're alone.

Music is truly the universal art form, native to every culture, expressing every feeling, and used for every social, cultural, or even purely entertainment purpose – including as background to movies, tv, or theater, to put us in the mood and to explain or intensify the action.

And, as music lovers and audiophiles, it's safe to say that we probably have even more love for and interest in music than other people. So, what do you listen to, and why?

I, personally, am all over the place, liking and having a reasonable collection of music of just about every kind – certainly every kind mentioned above. And, other than Hip-Hop, there's not one kind of music that I can think of that I haven't, at least once, and maybe even hundreds of times, been utterly blown away by. That includes such wonders as "Troublesome Waters" a Gospel tune first heard by me as performed by the Reverend Mr. and Mrs. Joseph W. Brooks (unfortunately no longer available), Orff's Carmina Burana performed by Gustavo Dudamel...

...the broken glass sound of Tom Waits...

...the charming and incredibly controlled operatic voice of Cecilia Bartoli...

...practically anything at all by Mexican singer, Lola Beltran, to me, at least, THE "guttiest" female singer of all time, (Here, so you can see what I mean are, not one but three examples:

There a many, many others, like The Red Army Choir performing "Kalinka"

 ...and even Tuvan throat-singing.

There is an immense wealth of music out there, waiting for you to find and enjoy. To do so, though, you're going to have to get out of your "comfort zone" and go looking. That's what happened to me.

When I was a kid, I was a music snob and listened almost exclusively to classical music. There were certain exceptions, of course, like the Coasters and some other doo-wop (You can't be a kid back then and not like doo-wop). In general, though, I thought that music had stopped being written in 1759, after the death of Handel. I especially despised all of the great popular concert favorites (things like Rossini's William Tell Overture, for example (The "Lone Ranger" theme) or Strauss' Blue Danube waltz or any of many others), calling them "warhorses", equating the words "popular" and "plebeian", and thinking them simply beneath me.

I even thought that Leopold Stokowski transcribing and re-arranging Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor from pipe organ, with my favorite performance being from Carl Weinrich.

To full symphony orchestra for Disney's Fantasia was the gravest sacrilege, instead of the great art I later discovered it to be.

By my late teens, though, it finally dawned on me that the reason that popular music of any kind became popular was that people liked it! The classical warhorses hadn't remained concert favorites for as much as hundreds of years and become warhorses not just because they were old, but because they were good, and because, apparently, everybody other than me recognized it and wanted to hear them again and again. And Elvis Presley and, later, The Beatles, were good, too, and Pink Floyd, and Leonard Cohen, and Queen, and I had simply never allowed myself to notice it.

Four major factors combined to wake me up musically and start to get me to where I am now. In 1958, I turned 16 and got a driver's license and my first car. With wheels, I and my friends could go to the beatnik coffee houses that were becoming a fad at around that time. The great Folk music revival was also happening and, in Los Angeles, was centered at the places where we hung out. And I met and became friends with Skip Weshner, a radio disc jockey who had, to this day, the broadest range of musical tastes and knowledge of anyone I've ever met.

Between Skip, the musicians who appeared on his show, some of whom I was also privileged to meet, and the coffee houses, I was introduced to folk music, jazz, Mexican and Russian music, the Mazowsze Ensemble of Poland, the incredible music of Mado Robin (all amazing, but wait for the impossible high note!

And Aksel Schiotz, and a host of other artists and musical genres, none of which I would ever even have heard of (let alone heard) otherwise.

It's all still out there, and you can access it, just as I did. All you have to do is go looking.

First off, try listening to some of the music I've included here. Some of the sounds (Robin [pronounced "row-ban"] and Schiotz) are ancient and awful, but the artistry and the music are still beyond compare. Another thing to do is to try listening to something other than your normal fare on your car or other radio. Hunt around; there's no way I can guess what might be available where you are, but in Los Angeles, both AM and FM radio are rich in non-mainstream musical styles (Classical, Jazz, Gospel, R&B, and C&W) plus they offer music of non-mainstream cultures and ethnicities, and there's always something interesting to find.

Note: When you listen, listen with an open mind and for long enough both to "get a feel" for the style of the music and for something great to come on. Think of it as like trying a new foreign cuisine: You need to give your tastebuds time to adjust to new flavors and you need to try more than one dish!

Note 2: When at home, or mobile via an internet-enabled device, Radio Garden gives you (literally) a world of music choices. Feel like taking a chance, then listen to this radio station, or this one, or perhaps this is more to your liking? There's a Long Beach jazz station, or perhaps you'd enjoy Germany's opposite of that. 

Another thing to do is to simply go to the internet and take a look at a whole range of "top 100" or "Best Selling" recordings . You'll find them for just about any kind of music you can imagine, including jazz, pop, classical, rock, show tunes, and whatever else – even including one for the "Best World Music of All Time."

Every one of the recordings you'll find listed will be of music that people who "are into" that sort of thing have found to be a favorite, so there's a good chance you may like it, too. And if you do, your life will be enriched by just that much, and it may even encourage you to go looking for more new things, to enrich it even more.

And don't worry about ever running out of new kinds of music to explore and potentially love: There's also a listing on the internet of all of the various genres and sub-genres of music now available. Find and check out a whole range of things that are new to you. And then...

Enjoy the music!

 

Roger Skoff