“She watched his eyes. Why is it that some people display themselves in their eyes, she wondered, while others do not? Her own eyes, she well knew, usually displayed only what she wanted them to, while people like Frank seemed unable to dissemble, unable to hide even the most fleeting thought. You couldn’t help trusting eyes like that.”

Jon Hassler, North of Hope

Various forms of the records-that-changed-my-life meme have been making the rounds lately, so I came up with my own version, which I call “The Twenty-Five Record Albums That Changed My Life.” Throughout the coming month, I’ll write about one of these albums each weekday in the rough order in which I first heard them.

15. Leonid Kogan with Kiril Kondrashin and the Philharmonia Orchestra, Brahms D Major Violin Concerto, Op. 77 (Seraphim)

My father had no knowledge of or interest in classical music, and I’m sure he was thrown for a loop when I asked for a violin in sixth grade and became for a time deadly serious about learning how to play it. Still, he loved me and wanted me to have as many opportunities as he could afford to give me, so he sprung for the violin and, later on, an upright piano (along with private lessons on both instruments).

Almost as important, he brought home a record for me whenever time he passed through Memphis in his capacity as a traveling wholesale hardware salesman. He bought them at a now-defunct store called Poplar Tunes whose previous patrons, I later learned, had included Elvis Presley. I assume he took counsel from the salespeople there, for the albums he bought were always first-rate.

The one I remember best was a 1958 recording of the Brahms Violin Concerto performed by Leonid Kogan, then one of Soviet Russia’s leading classical violinists, accompanied by Kiril Kondrashin and the Philharmonia Orchestra, at that time the top symphony orchestra in London. I knew who Brahms was, of course, but I’d yet to hear any violin concertos by anyone, and this one hit me with the force of a cranked-up cannonball. Strangely enough, it’s not a virtuoso showpiece, difficult though it is to play: it’s more like a symphony for violin and orchestra, with a magnificent first movement that is twenty minutes long, and I navigated its grandly craggy expanses as if I were a musical mountain climber.

Kogan, who died in 1982, isn’t well known in the West, and while he recorded extensively, my present-day collection contains only a couple of the piano trios that he taped with Emil Gilels and Mstislav Rostropovich. I assume that he led a complicated and difficult life—he was a Russian Jew who was widely thought to be a KGB informer—but I’ve never read a biography of him and so can’t tell you much more than that.

By then I played the violin competently enough to understand how hard the Brahms concerto was and appreciate in a general way how finely Kogan played it, but when you’re hearing a masterpiece for the first time, you take for granted that you’re hearing it played correctly and well. Fortunately for me, Kogan and Kondrashin performed the piece with magisterial authority, an impression that I verified long after the fact by listening to the first movement on YouTube the other day. It is a gripping interpretation, and I’m lucky that it was my first encounter with a work that means as much to me today as it did in 1970. While I now favor other, more distinctively individual interpretations, there’s nothing even slightly wrong with this one.

Brahms has always been one of the classical composers who means the most to me. My love for his music started here.

(To be continued)

*  *  *

Leonid Kogan, Kiril Kondrashin, and the Philharmonia Orchestra perform the Brahms Violin Concerto in 1958:

*  *  *

To read about album #1, go here.

To read about album #2, go here.

To read about album #3, go here.

To read about album #4, go here.

To read about album #5, go here.

To read about album #6, go here.

To read about album #7, go here.

To read about album #8, go here.

To read about album #9, go here.

To read about album #10, go here.

To read about album #11, go here.

To read about album #12, go here.

To read about album #13, go here.

To read about album #14, go here.

A digitally restored version of the kinescope of the original live TV version of Rod Serling’s “Requiem for a Heavyweight,” broadcast by CBS on October 11, 1956, as an episode of Playhouse 90. Directed by Ralph Nelson, it stars Jack Palance, Kim Hunter, and Ed and Keenan Wynn:

(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)

“Don’t ever think you’ve succeeded. Always try to do better—otherwise, drop dead.”

Arturo Toscanini (in rehearsal with La Scala’s orchestra, 1946)

Various forms of the records-that-changed-my-life meme have been making the rounds lately, so I came up with my own version, which I call “The Twenty-Five Record Albums That Changed My Life.” Throughout the coming month, I’ll write about one of these albums each weekday in the rough order in which I first heard them.

14. Crosby, Stills & Nash (Atlantic)

Rock and roll had been around long enough by 1969 for the groups that first caught my ear to have since spawned what were then known as “supergroups,” bands whose members had defected from other bands for reasons of their own. Crosby, Stills & Nash, for instance, consisted of David Crosby of the Byrds, Stephen Stills of Buffalo Springfield, and Graham Nash of the Hollies, all of whom had jumped ship (or, in Crosby’s case, been pushed) from the bands that made them famous. Their music combined shimmering three-part group-harmony vocals with tight, meticulously overdubbed instrumental tracks on which Stills did most of the playing, causing him to be dubbed “Captain Manyhands” by his colleagues.

Why did their music connect so strongly with thirteen-year-olds like me? In my own case, sheer prettiness had something to do with it. “Helplessly Hoping” and “Marrakesh Express” were neither harsh nor abrasive, and the way in which Crosby, Stills & Nash blended acoustic and electric instruments with their warm, sweet-toned vocals was unmistakably related to the older styles of the pop-conscious folksingers like Judy Collins for whom I had fallen a year or two earlier. (It didn’t hurt when I discovered that “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes,” one of the hit singles from Crosby, Stills & Nash, was about Collins, who was and is a beautiful woman, and that she was then romantically involved with Stills, who wrote it.) Above all, I responded with excitement to the album’s uncanny precision and technical polish—every note was in place—which gave me a goal to shoot for in my own music-making.

Whatever the reasons, Crosby, Stills & Nash were big in 1969, and got even bigger when Neil Young, also formerly of Buffalo Springfield, joined the group a year later for its second album, Déjà Vu. I heard them on the radio, saw them on stage in Woodstock, and listened to both albums over and over again, trying—mostly in vain—to play their self-written songs on the not-very-good acoustic guitar that my father had obligingly bought me. I actually talked my mother into taking down the lyrics to “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” in shorthand so that I could sing them correctly. Had I started a band of my own, I’m sure that’s just what I would have wanted it to sound like.

Before long, though, I started to lose my taste for their grit-free ensemble style, which increasingly struck me as more than a little bit sugary as I encountered other, more harder-edged varieties of rock and roll. It is, needless to say, perfectly possible to like both Crosby, Stills & Nash and Live at Leeds, but most listeners do end up tilting more or less strongly one way or the other.

As for their songs, I now blush to admit that I used to be thrilled by the lyrics, most of which now strike me as the worst kind of irony-challenged pop pseudo-profundity. Take “Wooden Ships,” in which Crosby, Stills, and Paul Kantner, one of the founding members of Jefferson Airplane, portrayed a world destroyed by nuclear war and imagined themselves as “the few survivors, escaping on a boat to create a new civilization.” I’d forgotten until I listened to it the other day for the first time in years that “Wooden Ships” has what must be the most shy-making opening line of any of the once-beloved rock songs of my youth: “If you smile at me, I will understand/’Cause that is something everybody, everywhere does/In the same language.” What can I tell you? We boomers couldn’t get enough of that kind of thing.

To be sure, I can still appreciate and respect the immaculate craftsmanship of Crosby, Stills & Nash, which is the squeaky-clean embodiment of what instrumentalists call “clean picking.” Moreover, there are a couple of songs that I continue to enjoy, above all Crosby’s “Guinnevere,” a genuinely haunting ballad that Miles Davis, of all people, liked enough to cover in his latter phase as a sort-of-rocker. Of the two dozen albums on this list, though, Crosby, Stills & Nash is the one to which I have returned least often in adulthood. Whatever its other virtues, most of it simply isn’t adult fare, not in the way that Miles and the Beatles are capable of holding the attention of mature ears and minds. It is in every way music by and for the young, and thus can have little to say to older people beyond reminding them of how very young they were once upon a time.

(To be continued)

*  *  *

“Guinnevere,” from Crosby, Stills & Nash:

Crosby, Stills & Nash perform “Wooden Ships” at Woodstock in 1969:

*  *  *

To read about album #1, go here.

To read about album #2, go here.

To read about album #3, go here.

To read about album #4, go here.

To read about album #5, go here.

To read about album #6, go here.

To read about album #7, go here.

To read about album #8, go here.

To read about album #9, go here.

To read about album #10, go here.

To read about album #11, go here.

To read about album #12, go here.

To read about album #13, go here.

“Even though every individual possesses the truth, when he or she gets together in a crowd, untruth will be present at once, for the crowd is untruth.”

Søren Kierkegaard, undated journal entry, c. 1846-47

Various forms of the records-that-changed-my-life meme have been making the rounds lately, so I came up with my own version, which I call “The Twenty-Five Record Albums That Changed My Life.” Throughout the coming month, I’ll write about one of these albums each weekday in the rough order in which I first heard them.

13. Miles Davis’ Greatest Hits (Columbia)

Forty-nine years after the fact, I can’t remember how or why I first got interested in Miles Davis. Not that you would have needed a reason to be interested in Miles in 1970, for that was the year of Bitches Brew, the double album in which he broke away from the conventions of modern acoustic jazz and started playing his own idiosyncratic version of what is now called “fusion jazz.” Everybody in the world of jazz was talking about Miles Davis. But I wasn’t part of the world of jazz: I lived in a small town in southeast Missouri, I didn’t listen to modern jazz, and none of my friends listened to any kind of jazz, modern or otherwise. Nor did Miles appear very often on network TV: he turned up on a 1970 episode of The Tonight Show that was hosted by Bill Cosby, a jazz buff, but I didn’t see it. (My parents frowned on my staying up that late on school nights.)

I must have read something, possibly a review in High Fidelity or Stereo Review, that piqued my interest in Miles. Having done so, the logical next step would have been to hop on my bicycle, pedal downtown to Collins Piano Company, and buy one of his albums. Unfortunately, Miles Davis’ Greatest Hits, an erratically programmed 1969 compilation of small-group sides recorded for Columbia between 1956 and 1965, was the only one that the store had in stock. I would have done better to start with Miles Ahead or Kind of Blue. But Miles Davis’ Greatest Hits was what I brought home with me that fateful day, and it turned the trick far more than adequately.

I put on the first track, “Seven Steps to Heaven,” an up-tempo swinger whose title refers to the seven-note staccato riff that sets the tune in motion. WIthin a minute—less than that, really—my mouth was hanging open with astonishment, not just at Miles’ crisp, elliptical solo but at the lighter-than-air accompaniment of Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, and Tony Williams, who sounded nothing like the rhythm sections I’d heard on the jazz albums in our living-room record cabinet. Their music had a right-this-second immediacy, a quality I’d been looking for without knowing it.

I had no idea who any of these three men were, much less that they were generally thought to be the most creative rhythm section in modern jazz. Nor did I know that Miles Davis himself was a unique figure in his own right, the only jazz musician who had succeeded in remaining innovative and influential throughout the greater part of his career. For that matter, I didn’t even think the Miles Davis Quintet was necessarily better (whatever that might mean) than Louis Armstrong’s All Stars or the Dave Brubeck Quartet. Even then, I knew by instinct that there were many mansions in the house of jazz, that you could move from one to the other as often as you liked, and that this flexibility was part of what made jazz so special.

“Attempts at a definition of jazz have always failed, and this reveals something about its mixed origins and later stylistic diversity,” Max Harrison wrote a decade later in the key article about jazz in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. He was, and is, exactly right. Jazz is a music distinctive above all for its ability to assimilate other musics without compromising its own clear identity. This has always been part of what I love most about jazz…and yet I also knew that I longed desperately to play bass someday in a band that sounded just like that.

I never did, of course. If I had, the rest of my life might have turned out very differently.

(To be continued)

*  *  *

To read George Frazier’s original liner notes for Miles Davis’ Greatest Hits, go here.

“Seven Steps to Heaven,” by Miles Davis and Victor Feldman, performed by the Miles Davis Quintet in 1963. The band also includes George Coleman on tenor saxophone, Herbie Hancock on piano, Ron Carter on bass, and Tony Williams on drums:

“My Funny Valentine,” by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, performed by the Miles Davis Quintet on stage in Milan on October 11, 1964. George Coleman is replaced by Wayne Shorter:

*  *  *

To read about album #1, go here.

To read about album #2, go here.

To read about album #3, go here.

To read about album #4, go here.

To read about album #5, go here.

To read about album #6, go here.

To read about album #7, go here.

To read about album #8, go here.

To read about album #9, go here.

To read about album #10, go here.

To read about album #11, go here.

To read about album #12, go here.

“In the face of the lack of direct mathematical demonstration, one must be careful and thorough to make sure of the point, and one should make a perpetual attempt to demonstrate as much of the formula as possible. Nevertheless, a very great deal more truth can become known than can be proven.”

Richard P. Feynman, “The Development of the Space-Time View of Quantum Electrodynamics” (Nobel Lecture, December 11, 1965)