1000 Recordings to Hear Before You Die: A Spotify Playlist after Tom Moon's Book

"This is a book both broad and deep, drawing from the diverse worlds of classical, jazz, rock, pop, blues, country, folk, musicals, hip-hop, world, opera, soundtracks, and more. It's arranged alphabetically by artist to create the kind of unexpected juxtapositions that break down genre bias and broaden listeners' horizons— it makes every listener a seeker, actively pursuing new artists and new sounds, and reconfirming the greatness of the classics. Flanking J. S. Bach and his six entries, for example, are the little-known R&B singer Baby Huey and the '80s Rastafarian hard-core punk band Bad Brains. Farther down the list: The Band, Samuel Barber, Cecelia Bartoli, Count Basie, and Afropop star Waldemer Bastos."

"The goal, Moon writes in the introduction, is to spark curiosity about music —all forms of music. 'There's great treasure waiting on the other side of wherever you draw your territorial lines.'" - official site

I bought Tom Moon's 1000 Recordings To Hear Before You Die yesterday when it's featured on Kindle Store's daily deal. After skimming though the list, I was happy that there's tons of stuff I didn't know, and I liked most of the recordings I did know. My only complain, aside from Tommy made into the list instead of Quadrophenia, was that it didn't come with a Spotify playlist. Well, you can guess the rest.

Here's the Spotify Playlist: 1000 Recordings to Hear Before You Die (Tom Moon): An Index (805 tracks from 805 recordings). Ctrl (CMD)+G to browse in album view, and use the filter bar (Ctrl+F) to look for recordings. See complete list with essays here or download it as a pdf. Most of Moon's selections are albums, I kept only one track per recording for practical reasons: to get rid of the 10,000 tracks limitation, and keep the playlist easy to browse. I didn't mean to make it into a singles playlist, so I chose the tracks from albums rather randomly. Most recordings here deserve to be listened in their entirety.

Why only 805 recordings? Well, some artists like the Beatles and Led Zeppelin are not on Spotify yet. Also, I only included albums exactly matched the list. For example, Serkin's Complete Beethoven Piano Concerto with Ozawa is available, but the book recommends his earlier recordings with Kubelik; Spotify has many recordings of Oum Kalthoum, including a gigantic 26-CD set, but the very compilation listed in the book, Legend of Arab Music,  is not available, in both cases I didn't include them into this playlist. My goal is to create a playlist for the readers of the book, and people who are curious to explore, so I don't think any addition or alteration to the original list is necessary.

Miles Davis Complete Spotify Edition: In An Orderly Way

Spotify's artist pages of many great artists are simply unusable, like Elvis, Johnny Cash or Miles Davis. All their official releases are there, but hard to find. Because many albums were tagged by reissue dates, so it's impossible to browse their great body of works in chronological order. The real trouble is, the pages are flooded by numerous greatest hits/live sets from all sorts of labels that just want to cash-in through public domain recordings and grey market bootlegs.

The first album on Spotify's Miles Davis page is: 30 Masterpieces, from TSK Music (who?). I can't even find an official site for the label, and I don't know why they have the rights to release recordings originally from Prestige. And I don't understand why Spotify let all these unnecessary compilations in, since all official releases and compilations are already on Spotify, with better packaging, remastered sound quality, and reviews from AllMusic right under the tracklist. Ironically this compilation seems to be more popular than many official ones.

Hope Spotify sort this out soon. For those who can't wait, I made an easy-to-browse playlist after Wikipedia's Miles Davis discography.

The first part of the playlist chronicles all the official albums Davis recorded as the band leader, from Blue Period (1951) to Doo-Bop (1992), including the three soundtracks he made. The album Blue Period is not on Spotify, but all tracks are available on The Complete Prestige Recordings 1951-1956, which I put at the beginning of the playlist.

The second part features important live recordings from Columbia Legacy, and the last part consists of compilation and box sets. For box sets devoted to the complete sessions of classic albums like In A Silent Way, I put official album takes from the sessions box sets in the first part, and didn't include them again in the third part.

Here's the Spotify playlist: Miles Davis: Complete Spotify Edition (99 tracks, from 99 albums/box sets). I've tried my best to find the versions that are available on both sides of the pond, still a few albums are missing on Spotify USA. Press Ctrl (CMD)+G to browse in album view, and use the filter bar to find albums more quickly. Also see my previous post for John Coltrane playlists.

NPR 50 Great Voices on Spotify

The human voice is the most expressive instrument in the world, and the one with the most universal appeal. I've seen people who hates the sound of the violin or piano, but I guess everyone has a soft spot for a particular singer, or at least a loving grandparent or lifelong friend's voice. No you are not tone-deaf, otherwise, congratulations! You won't be able to tell the nagging of your wife from the tender moment when she said "I will".

On January 18th last year, NPR launched a series called 50 Great Voices. "Over the next year, we'll hear profiles of 50 singers who've made their mark internationally and across recorded history." And today this series is finally completed. Amazingly all 50 vocalists but one (Radmilla Cody) is available on Spotify. I collected them in one playlist. To round up 50, and to make up for the absent of East Asia in NPR's world map, I put in my favourite, and arguably the greatest Chinese pop singer Teresa Teng. Her core repertoire including Mandarin, Japanese and Southern Min songs. Since I don't think the western audience could understand the full meaning of Chinese songs without knowing the language, I put in a Japanese song. I don't know the meaning of the lyrics either, but though her voice I hear the perpetual longing for all the things that most of us mortals cease to dream of after we, supposedly, grow up.

Here's the Spotify playlist: NPR 50 Great Voices (50 tracks,total time: 3 hours) I tried to use the NPR picked tracks, if unavailable, then I put in the vocalist's most popular or representative song. Read more on NPR's series portal, and A-Z list of the greats.

New Yorker: Songs of the Years 1925-2010

This was not part of the Christmas Special plan, but when I saw this songs of the years list this morning on The New Yorker, I couldn't help to make a playlist for it. The Yankees got good taste, though it could be a bit tedious to listen through the whole thing as it's mostly American music. I will offer you a more refined one based on an more interesting idea next week. Stay tuned.

Here's the Spotify playlist: New Yorker: Songs of the Years 1925-2010 (86 tracks, 5 hours) For pre-1960 tracks like Art Tatum's Tea for Two, there might be many recorded versions, and I only chose the one from the year that matches the New Yorker list. The Digital Underground track from 1993 is not available and I replaced it with Wu-Tang Clan's C.R.E.A.M. released from the same year. And for the Beatles track I put in a cover version by Jimi Hendrix. Check out The New Yorker page for song list. I also pasted the song list below.

Amazon 100 Greatest Jazz and World Music Albums on Spotify

The Amazon editors listed 100 greatest albums of all time in a variety of categories. I use their Jazz and World Music lists to explore these genres. 98 of the Jazz albums and about 90 of the world music albums are on Spotify. I replaced the missing ones with other albums of the same artists.

Here are the Spotify playlists: Amazon: 100 Greatest Jazz Albums (1066 tracks, total time: 3 days) Amazon: 100 Greatest World Music Albums (1092 tracks, total time: 3 days) Press Ctrl (CMD on Macs) + G to browse in album view.

Check out the Amazon pages, Jazz and World Music, for album lists and reviews. The Christmas main course will be served next week. Don't worry about overeating, it will be organic food.

A Better Way to Browse Coltrane Albums on Spotify

Imagine one day, some boy in his early adolescence wants to express his individuality by listening to some music of that wild-eyed guy, whose poster was on the wall of Alex DeLarge's room in the Clockwork Orange, what would he do? Maybe he would type Beethoven into the Spotify search box, then click the first result: Ludwig van Beethoven. Then, if he had the patience to wait for over one minute for the artist page to load, he would be totally bemused by the hundreds of albums under Beethoven's name. The same thing could happen to a Jazz fan too, almost every famous artist's page is a jumble of studio albums, re-issues, re-packaged box-sets, live albums and all sorts of compilations. Try John Coltrane yourself.

For pop artists this is not a problem, most of the time. As their catalog are normally not as formidable as jazz or classical composers, and sometime it's nice to find an obscure cover song for some unknown soundtrack or tribute album in the compilations sections. But for jazz and classical artists, the artist page are pretty much useless. You have to know what you want exactly, otherwise you'll get lost. Therefore I suggest Spotify to modify the way the artist page was presented: do not load the compilation albums by default, but put them into a drop-down menu under the main studio releases. And only load the highlight albums for the artists that have too many albums under their name, at the first click. Then give the users options to explore their whole catalog. It would save the users more time, and also help Spotify to reduce server load and to save bandwidth, IMHO.

I compiled some Coltrane playlists for my own pleasure, grab them if they can save you some time as well:

Coltrane: Prestige Albums (99 track 13 hours)
Coltrane: Atlantic Albums (181 tracks, 17 hours)
Coltrane: Impulse! Albums (182 tracks 1 day)
Coltrane: Live Albums(152 tracks, 1 day)

Albums are filed in chronological order. Press Ctrl (Command on Macs) + G to browse in album view. You may subscribe to these playlists and then put them into a Coltrane folder.

Bernstein's Music Lectures: On Bach, Jazz and Symphonies

Here's the Spotify playlist: Bernstein's Music Lectures (146tracks, 13.6 hours). And here are the Amazon links to the two albums listed above, 1, 2. Other recordings featured in this playlist are Bernstern's lectures on Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique, Beethoven, Ives, and Bach's Saint Matthew Passion. My favourite part is Bernstein's analysis on Schumann's Symphony No.2 and his defense on Schumann's orchestration. Lenny's Schumann cycle with NYPO using Schumann's original orchestrations are fantastic, especially the 2nd.

Classical Goes Jazz

We've done a Jazz Goes Classical playlist before, this time it's the other way around. Here I collected recordings in which jazz musicians perform or improvise on classical works, in jazz style, so I didn't include Keith Jarrett or Jan Garbarek's classical recordings.

We've got Dave Brubeck, Oscar Peterson, and The Modern Jazz Quartet plays Bach, Chick Corea plays Mozart, Uri Caine plays Schumann, Wagner and Mahler. And many more. Here's the Spotify playlist: Classical Goes Jazz (185 tracks, 16.5 hours)

And here's the great late Oscar Peterson plays his original composition inspired by Bach's harmonies.

I know there must be many other recordings on Spotify that should be added into this playlist, leave a comment to tell me about your suggestions, thanks:)

Jazz Goes Classical

We've done film scores and pop songs, so why not jazz played by classical ensembles and orchestras?

This time the playlist consists of Quartet San Francisco Plays Brubeck, Kronos Quartet Plays Music Of Thelonious Monk and Bill Evans, Nigel Kennedy Plays Jazz, and Duke Ellington played by City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Sir Simon Rattle.

Besides a lovely wind trio performance of Take Five from Berlin Dreiklang Ensemble, also included are Detroit Symphony Orchestra plays Blue In Green and the Gillespie classic A Night In Tunisia, with Turtle Island String Quartet. And a beautiful classical guitar rendition of the last part of Keith Jarrett's legendary Koln Concert, by Manuel Barrueco.

Here's the Spotify playlist: Jazz Goes Classical. If there's more albums of this kind that you would like to recommend, please kindly leave a comment and I will add in, thanks:)