Compadres

The Dave Brubeck Trio Featuring Gerry Mulligan

Look past the narrative. Discount criticism. Seek understanding and respond, or imagine what is lacking and invent. Aggression leads to internment. Manipulation leads to entanglement. Neutrality is a natural state, easily suffocated by high winds and low oxygen. Speaking, inevitably, leads to recognition (desired or otherwise). But there is no other way.

The Latin Sound of Henry Mancini

Henry Mancini

Magnetism favors the nimble and sleek. Progress demands specialization, change, and neglect. Scholarship remembers. Gravity shepherds clutter. Chaos provokes balance. Engineering exchanges romance for exhilaration. The whirlwind strips and carries. Flotation repeats; descent seeks suspension. Welcome.

The Best of ’68

Terry Baxter & His Orchestra

Newness, remembered and articulated. Argued, but neither demonstrated nor concealed. Diminished excess employed in the service of health and opportunity. Translucent easter candy poured into a chiming crystal bowl. Adult, genderless, and anxious. This is an unsanctioned potion.

Come Softly to Me

The New Seekers

We were accordions -- free reed aerophones at the least -- clattering eavesdroppers busking for poise and context. Our buttons and keys were polished and our bellies provisioned with beeswax & pine rosin. Contorting and pivoting with the Baroque obedience of an orchestra: we were played.

Ray Conniff’s World of Hits

Ray Conniff

A dialectical mind, meditating on hot and cold, warming and cooling -- a spirit enthralled by a sun-stewed station wagon on a sub-zero afternoon: I discover that we vibrate (our amplitudes intrinsic, swapping focal distances...). We learn the pitch of fuses and the ashen yield of poor arithmetic; we breathe pure oxygen and Hydrox and more; we crave stillness, moisture, and protein.

Today, New Hampshire is marshmallow drifts and fat fish. May the thaw never come to pass; long live the thaw!

Plays 12 Big Instrumental Hits (Alley Cat/Green Onions)

Bill Justis

The coyote, mocked. There is no human activity more authentic than this, save displacement. The songdog howls the world into existence, but is not sufficient to command it; security and distribution are the occupation of pack mammals. In any case, the spirit of our undertaking will be defined by our relationship with this tufted anachronism.

That Happy Feeling

Bert Kaempfert & His Orchestra

There is a zeppelin -- mechanical, elegant -- bobbing in place over an inattentive suburban neighborhood and casting shadows on abject, restrained pets and idling power tools. A vibrating cord of horsehair and catgut binds the swaying, eager airship to the ground. This catalytic tension abides. Blithely and condescendingly romantic, it is a still image -- a long exposure, out of focus, selectively.