The Album Report

So I was listening to records this week, as I do every week. Every day, in fact. Yes, I am a nerd, but only in this one sense. Oh, shut up.

I heard a couple that gave me pause. First, there's this recording of Brahms First Symphony. I'm a Brahms guy because he is so rich. He wrote these articulate pieces that have it all, really: beautiful melody as their listening point, clever harmonic support that gets orchestrated in all the right ways, and departures into different spaces that come back to the original theme without losing you. In fact, it all adds up to a truly emotional experience that most composers hit only once in a while.

I hope I don't lose you with music critic talk of "harmonics" and "themes." Let me simplify as best I can so you'll actually get the thing and listen to it. A piece starts off with a melody that tells you what the piece sounds like. (Think Beethoven's 5th and "da da da DAAAAA!!!") It plays around this theme for a while, then skews it a bit in other directions. Then it comes back to the original. With Brahms, these departures are so intelligent you can forget what the original theme was because you're off in other directions of beauty. But when you return, it's like bumping into someone you met the night before and had great fun with, and you pick up where you left off.

Brahms had a real knack for orchestration. The parts that instruments and sections play, and how they all weave together, is very detailed. It allows the musical "voice" of the piece to express itself subtley as well as dynamically. Brahms has so much to hear, whether you're flipping through a magazine or meditating while it plays. I particularly like his chamber music: quartets, quintets and other -tets. These demonstrate his brilliance, because with the smaller number of instruments, you have to be great to pull off the complexity. Brahms was.

Next, I listened to recordings of the teenage Aretha Franklin, singing liturgical music at her father's church in the 1950s. Checker Records released the disc.

The recording isn't first rate because it was not done in the studio. They just set up mikes in church and captured the 14-year-old as she soared through "Precious Lord" and "Yield Not To Temptation" with the choir. It's pretty raw, which is good, and young Aretha welds purity of tone with volume: she positively shakes the walls, but the note is dead center. My fave moment was "While The Blood Runs Warm"—Huge! She is so great.

You have to be into religion or Aretha—or both, of course—to really appreciate this disc. You'll get a better Gospel fix if you watch the Gaither Homecoming shows on TV and you can certainly get better Aretha with her music since 1960. And even 78s have better production quality. But if you like recordings of human beings in their natural habitat, unvarnished and unassuming, and you want to hear what an actual god sounded like when she was—you know—learning the god ropes, this is for you. You don't get many goosebumps, though you will be impressed, but it's just plain cool to experience a Sunday morning in Detroit, 1956, pressed forever within vinyl grooves and available anytime. This record cheats history, kind of—the moment did not pass, it's still happening, whenever the stylus falls and the wax offers up that young girl who lifts us.