What I’m Playing & Listening to This Month

Classical

A flautist friend and I have been working hard on a Mozart flute concerto arranged for flute and piano. It’s the first time I have practiced a classical music duet in at least a decade. We’re having fun with it, but it’s a beast. It takes us about 40 minutes to play through all three movements (unlike the masters in the video below in which they play all three movements in half that amount of time, lol), and I’ve even developed some wrist pain from playing it (that I am attending to with TLC). We’re hoping to perform some of the concerto at a house show next month!

I haven’t really been listening to any classical music in my spare time, but one of my students brought in this piece by Japanese composer Joe Hisaishi for us to work on, and I really like its synth-y pop feel with a very classically East Asian pentatonic-scale-inspired melody. (I couldn’t find the original soundtrack version on YouTube, but here is a simplified acoustic rendition):

Jazz

For Father’s Day, my girlfriend’s father came over for a jam session. I had never heard him play sax before, and I also didn’t know that my own girlfriend was such a talented jazz flautist! We played through some standards in a Jamie Abersold book. Our final number was a jazz waltz version of “My Favorite Things,” which of course made me think of the famous John Coltrane version:

Recently, on the late-night drive back home from a book talk in a university town about an hour away, I asked Spotify to curate a late-night jazz mix for me, and was pleasantly, nostalgically, surprised when bits and pieces of Time Out (1959) by the Dave Brubeck Quartet came on. There are a lot of jazz aficionados who hate on the album, perhaps because it was so commercially successful. But it’s actually a really wonderful album. Great compositions and great playing all around by the four instrumentalists.

Pop

I don’t know why Taylor Swift got in my head again recently. I was truly happy to hear that she had won back control over her music. Anyway, my latest Instagram reel was a creative piano rendition of “Style.” It’s a solid pop song:

Spotify has been kind to me lately and introduced me to a lot of great new pop music. I’ve really been enjoying Saya Gray, and Chinese American Bear. But a special shout out to the weird Japanese synth-pop of Shoko Igarashi, who I have just discovered.