Peter Hammill
Over

There are facets of Peter Hammill’s work that I love more than ever. In Camera is a sort of avant-garde bedroom pop album, which is a cool as hell vibe. I still love Van Der Graaf Generator. Their particular brand of drama can be a little sophomoric. You sometimes wish they’d lean a little harder into the camp so you know they’re in on the joke. I guess they probably weren’t. Hammill certainly isn’t in on the joke on Over, a breakup album so sincere that it finds him singing “I am drunk with sadness, sunk by madness” without so much as a raised eyebrow in the following line. I still find myself humming bits of “Time Heals” many years after the last time I listened to it. But this really isn’t a very good album. 
Measure of gratitude: Small. Thank you. 

Herbie Hancock
Maiden Voyage
Head Hunters

These are two masterpieces of shockingly different stripes. Maiden Voyage is basically a mid-60s Miles Davis album with better trumpet playing, thanks to Freddie Hubbard. Head Hunters is an album I had assumed I was done with for years, until Pitchfork gave it a perfect score a couple years back and I revisited it. Turns out they were right. In my brief time in a jazz combo in high school, “Chameleon” was one of the tunes we played. We may even have played it at a fundraising gig. I wonder what my synth solo was like. I wonder how long my synth solo was. 
Measure of gratitude: Large. Thank you.  

Håkan Hardenberger
Famous Classical Trumpet Concertos

Hardenberger was one of my favourite trumpeters back when I had those. He was a little more restrained than Sergei Nakariakov, making him well suited to these buttoned down pre-romantic concertos, many of which are chalk dry. I can’t see myself ever listening to this music again in the finite time I have left on this mortal coil, but it meant something to me at one point. 
Measure of gratitude: Small. Thank you. 

Jethro Tull
This Was
Stand Up (Three-disc edition)
Benefit
Aqualung
Thick as a Brick
A Passion Play
War Child
Minstrel in the Gallery
Too Old To Rock ‘N’ Roll: Too Young To Die!
The Jethro Tull Christmas Album/Christmas at St. Bride’s 2008
Aqualung Live
Live at Montreux 2003

Jethro Tull wasn’t my first favourite band. (We’ll get there towards the end of the alphabet.) But they became my favourite band sometime around the age of 15, and their music continued to resonate with me just as strongly from that point on. These days I don’t listen to Jethro Tull as much as I used to, but when I do it does exactly the same thing to me as it did back then. I have this series I do on the radio where I interview people about the music that has shaped their lives. I have a set question I ask every time when we’re talking about music from their childhoods: “When you hear this now, do you hear it differently or is it pure nostalgia?” When I think about this question with respect to Tull, it’s hard to answer because I don’t hear it remotely differently. My enduring love for this music can’t be nostalgia, because nostalgia implies an awareness of the passage of time, an awareness I do not possess when I hear this. Some of my favourite albums by other artists, like Low or Another Green World are albums that I’ve known for a long time, but that took a long time for me to fully love. I look to those albums for evidence of growth: same music, different experience. Must be a different person. Listening to Jethro Tull has an opposite but equally reassuring effect: it demonstrates to me that there is some continuity of selfhood between my present self and the person I was at 15. It is just about the only experience that can do that. I don’t know anymore if I initially loved Jethro Tull because they resonated with the person I already was, or if the person I am is like this because of Jethro Tull. I recognize how ridiculous it seems to say this about the band with the flute player who stands on one leg. I recognize how ridiculous it seems to say this given that I was born in 1990. But here we are. 
Measure of gratitude: Larger than any other artist here. Thank you. 

The Jimi Hendrix Experience
Are You Experienced?
Electric Ladyland

I really like Jimi Hendrix. But when I think of the Hendrix I love, it’s the one I know from live videos on YouTube. I like hearing him stretch out and be spontaneous. He is almost certainly the best rock musician of his time in that mode. Moments on Electric Ladyland equal those live performances, but Are You Experienced is too fussy to get close. 
Measure of gratitude: Small. Thank you. 

Elton John
Goodbye Yellow Brick Road

I saw Elton John with my mother and godmother in Edmonton one time. Without ever really having listened to him intentionally, I knew every song. That’s how many hits that man has. I started listening to this a lot after that. I don’t love it from start to finish, and overall I think Madman Across the Water is a little better. But there’s nothing more thrilling than “Funeral for a Friend/Love Lies Bleeding.” It’s got everything. Gothic cathedral synths. Cossack dances. Big keyboard spanning chords straight out of the Tchaikovsky first piano concerto. A really good guitar riff. It’s everything you want 70s rock to be. 
Measure of gratitude: Substantial. Thank you. 

Paul Hindemith
The Complete Sonatas for Brass and Piano (Glenn Gould, Philadelphia Brass Ensemble)

This has a hilarious moment where Gould and horn player Mason Jones read Hindemith’s poetry. Gould really gives it his all, but Jones just doesn’t have the voice for it. The contrast is magnificent. It’s one of the funniest moments on any classical recording. Generally I like Hindemith. I clearly bought this for the trumpet sonata. These are all pretty good, and it’s got Glenn Gould on piano. Can’t go wrong. 
Measure of gratitude: Not small. Thank you.

Andreas Martin Hofmeir & Andreas Mildner
Why Not? 

This is an album of duets for tuba and harp. They know what you’re thinking, the title anticipates you. I have listened to it front to back… once. But I remember revisiting their recording of the meditation from Thais by Massenet several times. It’s actually quite lovely. 
Measure of gratitude: More than it deserves. Thank you. 

Steve Hudson’s Outer Bridge Ensemble
Seamless

I saw these guys at my high school auditorium. I have no idea how a bunch of pretty decent New York jazz musicians ended up playing at a high school in Fort McMurray, but they gave it their all. My cooler friends said they were really stoned. Maybe. All I know is they sure did think the northern lights were magnificent after the show. 
Measure of gratitude: Middling. Thank you. 

Michael Kamen
Brazil: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack (with National Philharmonic Orchestra of London)

Brazil was my favourite movie growing up. I’m not sure how I feel about it these days. On one hand, it’s a story about a faceless bureaucracy crushing a beautiful dreamer’s spirit. That’s pretty timeless. On the other hand, it’s a variation on the same story Terry Gilliam has been telling for his whole career, which is about how systems persecute the individual. At some point, that seemed especially resonant because of Gilliam’s struggles with the studio system, never more than with this movie. But these days, he’s developed a ridiculous persecution complex where he thinks that nobody in Hollywood wants to hear from white men anymore. In light of that, all of his old stories feel a little bit gross: has he just been an entitled jackass with no self-awareness this whole time? Whither Brazil if so? The music is unaffected by all of this. That Kamen wrote a whole score based on one stupid old standard, and that it listens like an old Hollywood epic is a remarkable thing. Plus, this has Kate Bush on it in a vocal performance that was (unforgivably) cut from the movie. 
Measure of gratitude: Substantial. Thank you. 

John Kander & Fred Ebb
Chicago (1996 Revival Cast)

When I was 14 years old I was in the male ensemble of a high school production of Chicago and my pants fell down onstage in the middle of “Razzle Dazzle.” 
Measure of gratitude: Fuck this music forever. Thank you.