Shuffle #1: Chet Baker, Neko Case, George Winston

I’m no Apple fanboy, but I love my iPod. Being able to carry in my pocket more hours of music and radio shows than I could listen to in a week would have been a science fiction dream for me back in 1985, when I lugged around a Walkman knock-off and had to choose carefully between Asia, Men At Work, and Kansas cassette tapes.

Making play lists is a little less fun, though, than compiling a mix tape was; with a nearly limitless palette, there are no constraints to force creative choice: finding just the right song to squeeze into the last three minutes of a Maxell 90-minute tape is not dissimilar to rounding out a sonnet with just the right couplet. So I usually let the iPod’s inner daemon select my songs for me.

I have either eclectic tastes, inconsistent tastes, or no taste at all, so some strange juxtapositions pop up. Here are three songs that the iPod picked today:

“I Remember You,” Chet Baker, from “Let’s Get Lost”
Chet Baker’s ravaged voice, sweet horn, and eternally boyish looks made him one of the tragic-pathetic figures of mid-century jazz. No one could swing a saccharine lyric quite like Chet; my favorite songs of his are the ones that are the sappiest, subtly undercut by his playful rhythms.

“Deep Red Bells”, Neko Case, from “Blacklisted”
Don’t listen to this one in the dark. There’s no scarier serial-killer song out there, and the spare arrangement with Neko’s full-throated voice makes it that much spookier. We never see the killer, and only glimpse pieces of his victim; it’s the imagistic flashes–handprints, engine oil, speckled fawns–that stay with you after the song is over.

“Too Much Between Us,” George Winston, from “Autumn (bonus track)”
When I was starting to make the transition into listening to jazz, George Winston was an easy bridge, with his recognizable melody lines and evocative emotionalism. I wasn’t surprised to find that he’s done a few prog-rock covers, like this Procol Harum song that shows up as a bonus track on an anniversary edition of “Autumn.” One of the great things about listening to ’70s prog-rock in the ’80s was that you could get a lot of it in the cut-out bins; I wore out my “La Historia del Rock” Procol Harum compilation tape while mowing the lawn, and both this tune and “Conquistador” still stand out. George Winston does it justice: a little syrupy, but haunting all the same.