A number of friends have invited me to play the following game that’s been making the rounds in cyberspace:
The rules: Don’t take too long to think about it–choose fifteen albums you’ve heard that will always stick with you. List the first fifteen you can recall in no more than fifteen minutes. (These aren’t favorite albums, necessarily, just the fifteen that will always stick with you.)
I drew my list up with as little forethought as possible. When I was finished, I realized that in all but a couple of instances, these were the albums that introduced me to the music of the artists who made them.
I subsequently got to know some of those artists personally. It was on Maria Bachmann’s Fratres, for example, that I first heard the music of Paul Moravec, with whom I was to collaborate on The Letter sixteen years later.
Here goes:
• Louis Armstrong, Satchmo at Symphony Hall
• Maria Bachmann and Jon Klibonoff, Fratres
• The Band, The Band
• Rosanne Cash, Black Cadillac
• Duke Ellington, Never No Lament: The Blanton-Webster Band
• Bill Evans, Conversations With Myself
• Vladimir Horowitz, The Historic Return
• Nancy LaMott, Come Rain or Come Shine: The Songs of Johnny Mercer
• Mabel Mercer, The Art of Mabel Mercer
• Pat Metheny, Bright Size Life
• Stephen Sondheim, A Little Night Music
• Luciana Souza, Brazilian Duos
• Steely Dan, Aja
• Joseph Szigeti and Béla Bartók, A Sonata Recital by Joseph Szigeti and Béla Bartók
• The Who, Live at Leeds