R2D4’21
RECORDS TO LIVE FOR!
In an ordinary year, the name of this annual feature, published every February since 1991, is a harmless, even amusing joke. In last year’s opening essay, I evoked a heavily armed intruder perusing your record collection late at night and holding your favorite record in his hands: Would you risk your life by confronting him? That’s hardly the first time that an author of the R2D4 lead essay made a joke about possibly dying.
The usual phrase—“Records to Die For”—would probably go over okay in 2021 as well. If I proceeded in the usual, lighthearted way or made ironic reference to our current circumstances, I doubt I’d get many angry letters. But, frankly, I don’t have the heart to write it. The time isn’t right.
We’re in the midst of a pandemic, as a result of which more than 250,000 Americans have died. By the time you read this, one in every 1000 Americans will have lost their lives as a result of the disease. A vaccine is on the horizon, so the future seems bright, but it won’t be widely distributed for several more months; meanwhile, the virus is spiking across America.
If you find all this depressing and would rather not read this sort of thing in a hi-fi magazine, I offer my most sincere apology. It is depressing, and at first I was unsure about writing it. But, as I have written before, and more than once, for those of us who love it, music is part of life; it’s important to keep this magazine rooted in that lived experience. I love my record collection, but, as I started to write this essay, in late November 2020, even the tongue-in-cheek suggestion of dying for a slab of vinyl seemed, well, off. This is not the right time for lighthearted jokes about mortality.
For this edition, then, I am using my editor’s prerogative to rename this feature—just this one time—Records to Live For. I view the change as so temporary that I’m not even going to bother to change our iconic initialism: This may be Records to Live For, but it’s still R2D4 2021. Then, next year, we return to our regular programming.
Music is life-affirming. It can shine at least a little light into even the darkest gloom. I’ve seen it do it all too recently.
Many of our writers, in making their selections, seem to have been thinking (or feeling) along similar lines. When I made my selections, I wasn’t explicitly thinking about death and disease, but one of my choices was by the Ventures; what could be more mindless than that? What could be more joyful and life-affirming than Kanda Bongo Man’s Amour Fou, one of Larry Birnbaum’s choices, or more poignant than Chick Corea’s Now He Sings, Now He Sobs, Larry’s other choice. In London, Phil Brett chose Magazine’s The Correct Use of Soap, commenting, “Add some neurosis and the very apt album title, and this defines me in these pandemic times.” Sasha Matson chose Lady Day (The Complete Billie Holiday on Columbia 1933-1944)—a singer who knew from suffering and yet provided much joy and eased much suffering through her music, and continues to.
Dan Ouellette chose Stay Awake (Various Interpretations of Music from Vintage Disney Films), one of several joyful, all-star productions from Hal Willner, who died in 2020 from COVID-19. (One highlight: The Replacements doing “Cruella de Ville”—pure adrenal joy.) Larry Greenhill chose Hans Zimmer’s soundtrack from Blade Runner 2049, which, he wrote, “reflects emptiness and loss.” One of Herb Reichert’s picks is the score from the HBO series Chernobyl, which “evokes dread, hopelessness, and dystopian collapse.”
Music provides catharsis, emotional uplift, and distraction. All three of those things are useful right now. Here’s hoping that some of these selections hit home for you and that these next few months are safe and uneventful.—
JOHN ATKINSON
J.S. BACH
TRIOS
Chris Thile, mandolin, guitar; Yo-Yo Ma, cello; Edgar Meyer, double bass.
Nonesuch 558933 (2 LPs; CD; 24/96 AIFF files available from HDTracks and Presto Music; 24/48k MQA-encoded FLAC file available as a Tidal stream that unfolds to 24/96k). 2017. Ruth E. DeSarno, exec. prod.; Steven Epstein, prod.; Richard King, eng.
With the exception of the Brandenburg Concertos, which were written with specific solo instruments in mind, the instrumental music of Johann Sebastian Bach seems to exist on a separate plane from the actual scoring. From William Malloch’s arrangements for string orchestra of the Art of Fuguing on Sheffield Lab—see -1983-art-fuguing—which was originally composed for an unspecified keyboard instrument, to the extraordinary vocal stylings on), is not quite at the level of the musicianship, being slightly on the dry side. But no matter: Bach: Trios has been in heavy rotation since Jason Victor Serinus recommended it to me.
