What I’m Playing & Listening to This Month

Classical

Since last time, my essay on Aaron Copland’s “Appalachian Spring” has come out in VAN magazine, a European classical music magazine that’s got some of the best classical music writing on the Internet. So in honor of that post, here’s Aaron Copland himself conducting his famous orchestral suite:

In terms of actually playing the keys, I haven’t been working on any classical lately, but one of my students entreated me recently to play through Debussy’s Arabesque for them, so here is a version of that piece (or at least the first part of it!):

Jazz

I’m still in my Thelonious Monk phase! Or back in it, I should say. Since I first discovered Monk, back in my teens in the 1990s, I’ve always been a fan, especially of his compositions. I put on Brilliant Corners recently—one of the best jazz albums of all time—and fell in love all over again with “Pannonica”:

But doesn’t the title track also go incredibly hard? Check it out:

In terms of playing, when I was at my childhood home last month, I picked up a bunch of old music books, including The Real Book (vols. 1 and 2), probably the most famous jazz fake book of all time. It was created by jazz students who basically wrote out all of their favorite jazz songs by hand, by ear, and then made copies for their friends, or at least that’s the story I remember hearing back in the 1990s when I got my hand on the fake book. Copyright laws be damned, I guess!

Pop

I recently discovered Baltimore-based artist Nourished by Time, who has a new album on the way. His song “Hell of a Ride” from last year is pretty great, in terms of both the immaculate production and the singing/rapping style. There are some really great throwback elements here to 1990s-era melodic rap, and I’m living for it.

In terms of the keys, literally the most recent pop song I have learned to play is ABBA’s “Dancing Queen,” because a student came in and said that they love ABBA, so we gave it a shot, and damn if that’s not a really fun song to play on the piano!

We didn’t play it ragtime style, but who’s to say you couldn’t if you wanted to?