Favorite Things: Miles & Ruth & Harry

I was reading an article in Newsweek about the Miles Davis album Kind of Blue, which turns 50 this year.  The article notes that the album is the top-selling jazz album of all time, and that it was so popular in the years after it came out that Miles Davis was a pop celebrity of the era.  This is one of those cliche albums that you feel funny about putting on a favorites list, because everyone else has got it on their lists.  Sgt. Pepper and Pet Sounds fall into that category as well.  I have no hesitation about putting any of those on any all-time favorites list.  They are masterpieces and, for me, they’ve stood the test of time.  Quincy Jones points out that Kind of Blue sounds like it could’ve been made yesterday.  I agree, but would an album like it have been made yesterday?  Was an album like it made yesterday, and released into oblivion? 

On my camping vacation last week (reading and hiking, but no running, due to my knee issues), I finished the wonderful book Lark and Termite and started on A Sight for Sore Eyes, a Ruth Rendell psychological thriller written in 1998.  I seldom read books in that genre, but I went through a period during which I read quite a few of Rendell’s non-Wexford books, novels that invariably feature several unrelated characters whose lives very gradually become intertwined.  And one of those characters always winds up being a psychopath.  I enjoy these books, and Ruth Rendell is such a careful writer that they don’t seem like guilty plesasures.  I picked this one up because it was on a list I saw of Entertainment Weekly’s “most readable” books of the past quarter-century.  It didn’t disappoint.  I went into town and bought another Rendell, The Water’s Lovely, which isn’t nearly as tension-building or labyrinthine, but nevertheless is a page-turner.

Yesterday morning, on my last day before returning to work, I put on one of my favorite LP sides of all time (yes, children, we used to think in terms of record sides): side one of Nilsson’s Nilsson Schmilsson.  It’s a concept half-album of songs that seem to represent the conflicted feelings one has in the wee hours of the night and in the morning after.  The songs, in order, are: “Gotta Get Up,” “Driving Along,” Early in the Morning,” “The Moonbeam Song,” and “Down.”  A great mood piece.  Side two is a mishmash.

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