theodosia | Desert Island 15

So,

vonnie_k showed me the way to a Frankenmix challenge that sounds pretty neat, over in

calikali's LJ, the monthly challenge this time being Your Fifteen Desert Island songs:

Imagine you're stuck on a desert island (for the rest of your life). There are fifteen songs you can listen to, ever again. What songs would you want them to be?

That made me go look at my iTunes stats and try to pick out the ones that I know I have listened to over and over again, and could do so again. So from a really scientific viewpoint, what are they?

I know I can't do them all in one go, but 5 of the 15 tonight would certainly be possible....

Not in any particular order, but if I don't number them I know that I'll lose count, so here goes:

1. Believe What You Say, Ricky Nelson. Yes, he was the son of Ozzie & Harriet, and responsible for a couple tepid hits, but when you get away from those, you find a truly delightful body of work, like this favorite gem of mine. Especially, listen for the guitar break which just goes over the top about halfway through. Sheer love!

2. Heartaches, The Marcels. Has heart ache ever sounded so much fun? There's a playfulness to doo wop that I find irresistible, and songs like this are why, like little acapella sonnets, born of an illicit romance between gospel and Broadway show tunes.

3. Harlem Nocturne, The Viscounts. My list is going to be heavily weighted toward instrumentals (not so much this first five) -- this in particular is an old jazz standard, rocking out like a well-oiled machine. Jazz never really died, but it disguised itself a whole lot for a while....

4. You Know What I Mean, The Turtles. So many Turtles songs that I could have gone with, but I grabbed one that you're a little less likely to have heard, from a period when their Beatlesesque production was at its height.

5. You've Got To Taste All The Fruit, Leroy Holmes. I'm just fascinated by this slinky slinky song, and if I ever develop enough vidding skills, I'm going to riffle through Singin' in the Rain and montage my way through the whole thing, because to me this song sounds as though it should have been part of it!

(All links got to Box.Net, which I'm experimenting with.)

A word about my selection criteria: I went with a very quantitative criterion, since iTunes keeps a reliable count of the number of times I've listened to each of the 3K songs currently in the library. I looked through my Top 50, and decided not to repeat artists, which meant some heartbreak, but what the hell, it's only songs, right?

6. Tracy, The Cuff Links -- pure pop perfection. It should be choreographed on film with big sweeping camera angles and dancers pouring out of doorways.

7. Christopher Columbus, Fletcher Henderson -- I picked this one as my favoritest Henderson cut before finding out that it was the signature song of his band, so I suppose he agreed with me.

8. The Millionaire's Holiday, Combustible Edison -- Another group I could pick any of a dozen or so "favorites" so I went with this one. But they're all excellent!

9. The Mooche, Duke Ellington & His Orchestra -- another artist whom I could have chosen ten songs easily enough, but this one stands out for the sweet and silly scat singer who comes in about halfway. Before starting to listen to jazz, I thought Ellington would be as tough as classical music to get ahold of, but instead it's warm and sensual and oh so danceable.

10. S.O.S., ABBA -- I truly think ABBA's reputation would actually be better if they'd only sung in Swedish, because the words are almost extraneous to the real virtues of the music and the singing. The lyrics aren't awful, but they are very pedestrian compared to the intricacy supporting them.

Not surprisingly, most of my most-listened songs tend to be ones that I've had the longest, so I suppose it's not too surprising that so many jazz entries predominant, since I 'discovered' jazz a few years ago thanks to the Ken Burns series, and a bunch of song files here are from the CD set associated with it. Look me up again in ten years and we'll see if they're still up there.

But really, I'd distrust any list I put together comprised mostly of recent (less than a year) songs because I don't think I could say if I was going to get tired of the music over a long period.

I maybe should have selected some of the Iggy Pop or Brian Eno or Beatles or Monkees or other music that I've listened to years before I started running all my music through iTunes, since surely I've listened to individual songs and collective albums many more times with my CD player on repeat. But that would involve guestimating... and anyway, I'm pretty sure you've all heard the Beatles by now, and honestly, Eno doesn't appeal to very many.

So here's the last of my 15:

11. Begin the Beguine, Artie Shaw -- if I could nominate one recording to be the most perfect and precise realization of a tune, ever, I might be tempted to go with this one. For all that it's almost geometric in the way the notes and melody proceed complexly together, it's also warm, happy, intelligent and danceable.

12. Blue's Theme, Davy Allen & The Arrows -- and from one kind of danceable to another. This is from the amazing Rhino Records Nuggets box set which is definitely a big pre-iTunes favorite that still influences me.

13. Crazy Rhythm, Roger Wolfe Kahn -- the only song that I haven't owned for multiple years, since it's from the Rhythm Crazy compilation that I ran into at the iTunes Store, all of 20s songs. What a crazy diamond this cut is, and after many listens, I wondered if the drummer had studied with Gene Krupa, so I went googling and found out that yes, it was a young Krupa on display here.

14. Rock n' Roll Girl, The Beat -- After so much jazz, I ran my finger down the column and found this worthy, rocky, poppy song lurking.

15. Sing Sing Sing, Benny Goodman -- and I'll end my 15 with this cut, the full version with all the Gene Krupa drumming that you could want.

And that's it, though since, I'm using Box.Net this time, I can give you a special link that will take you back to all of the zipped songs if you want.

(The stats, in case you're interested, are 8 jazz/ 8 rock songs (counting Harlem Nocturne as a twofer, 6 instrumentals (8 if you count The Mooche and The Millionaire's Holiday where the vocals are arguably an afterthought), and 3 of the non-instrumentals have female vocalists.)

Desert Island 15

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hooray, a bevy of jazz hands!