Welcome back, my friends, to the show that never ends. My pals marveled at the preposterous size of Carl Palmer’s drum rig when we saw Emerson, Lake & Palmer perform at Kansas City’s Municipal Auditorium in 1977. With the punk and reggae insurgencies on my radar, I wasn’t quite as gobsmacked as my peers. Even so, I willingly submitted to the bombastic spectacle.

As I’ve periodically recalled at this site, progressive rock bands like Rush and jazz fusion ensembles including Return to Forever were the music of choice among boys in my neighborhood in the mid-’70s. The free-thinking musician Brad Mehldau apparently heard a lot of the same stuff during his formative years. He gives my guilty pleasures a breathtaking makeover on his latest release.

Like all proper prog-rock recordings, Jacob's Ladder is a concept album with a somewhat muddled theme. I suspect the biblical allegory will become clearer with repeated listening, but for now I’m entranced by Mehldau’s ability to tickle my repressed auditory pleasure centers without making me feel like a cheap date. Jacob’s Ladder is guaranteed to blow your head apart.

William Brownlee

December 11, 2020

O Fortuna

William Brownlee

December 11, 2020

Screenshot of Jean-Pierre Ponnelle’s 1975 lurid interpretation of Carmina Burana by There Stands the Glass.

I’m mutating before your very eyes. With the task of making life-and-death decisions such as whether or not the slightly cloying adult pop of Lianne La Havas’ self-titled album really belongs on my year-end album list finalized, I have time to begin exploring the alien sonic terrain I’ve discovered through my ongoing opera binge. Examples:

*What in the wide, wide world of sports is a-goin’ on here? I may never recover from witnessing a German troupe’s lighthearted depiction of sensual pleasures and eternal damnation set to Carl Orff’s infamous canticle Carmina Burana.

*I stumbled upon the Empty Concertgebouw Sessions series via Brad Mehldau’s breathtaking entry, but the Van Baerle Trio’s stunning interpretation of Beethoven’s “Ghost” floored me. I’m also pleased to learn of Lilian Farahani.

*Back on the opera beat: 1992 production of Claude Debussy’s “Pelléas et Mélisande”- #264 in my daily binge- shook me.

My tiny world is rapidly expanding. Paraphrasing Aristotle, the more I know, the more I realize I don’t know. Yet it’s still too soon to say farewell to the old me. I recently admired Shawn Mendes’ latest homage to Paul McCartney, the Kansas City rapper Rich The Factor’s eighth release of 2020, Doug Carn’s solid contribution to the excellent Jazz Is Dead series and Kelly Finnigan’s impressive new Christmas album.