Stephen Sondheim
Assassins (Original Cast Recording)

Regardless of what you think about musical theatre, your opinion of Stephen Sondheim kind of has to be separate from that. He’s one of those artists who is larger than the genre he writes in. He’s one of the greatest songwriters who ever lived, and even when his shows are flawed, like Assassins is, they illustrate the absolute highest level of character songwriting: a kind of writing that I identify as much with Kate Bush or John Darnielle as with Sondheim’s fellow Broadway icons. This cast recording is a rough listen in a few places, but the sheer perversity of a bunch of presidential assassins jauntily singing “everybody’s got the right to be happy” gives me shivers every time. 
Measure of gratitude: Very large. Thank you. 

Spiritualized
Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space

I stole this from work and haven’t spent as much time with it as I meant to. I’ve loved it on the couple of occasions I’ve listened to it. I’ll come to love it more someday, I’m sure. 
Measure of gratitude: Small. Thank you. 

Sufjan Stevens
Illinois 

This is an album I ought to have heard in high school, but actually heard many years afterwards. The album that finally converted me into a Sufjan fan was Carrie & Lowell, an album so different from this that it may as well be by another artist entirely. Carrie is a spare, beautiful, delicate songwriter album where every song makes me cry at least 70% of the time. Illinois is a maximalist, symphonic rock record that 16-year-old Parsons would have loved. I like it fine even now, but I discovered it past the point where it would have grabbed me instantly. Sufjan Stevens could have been an artist that came with me through two phases of my taste evolution. As it stands, I’ll probably never love his early stuff as much as Carrie & Lowell. 
Measure of gratitude: Medium. Thank you. 

Eric St-Laurent Trio
Ruby

I reviewed this for my undergraduate student newspaper, where they used to pass out CDs that got sent to the offices to whoever wanted to review them. I took this one at my first editorial meeting, because I thought it would impress people that I knew something about jazz. It didn’t. The review was my first piece of published writing. Haven’t listened to it since. 
Measure of gratitude: Small. Thank you. 

Karlheinz Stockhausen
Stimmung (Singcircle)

I went through a phase in high school of wanting to hear the weirdest shit that every musical tradition had to offer. I knew Stockhausen was one of 20th-century classical music’s most controversial eccentrics. And I’d heard a section of this piece on a long vanished old Naxos compilation. I bought it at a shop in Edmonton where I also bought my first professional model B-flat trumpet. I told the shopkeeper I’d heard the first few minutes and liked it. “The rest is exactly the same,” he replied. He was correct. I loved it anyway. This is over an hour of a small vocal group just singing the overtone series. The length of it is the point. I could certainly do without the erotic poetry recitations scattered throughout, though. 
Measure of gratitude: Large. Thank you. 

Richard Strauss
Wind Sonatinas (Armonia Ensemble)

This was pressed into my hands by a former colleague who knew I’d played a wind instrument. Most classical music people don’t like music for wind instruments and it tends to make one a little defensive. Not much to defend here, though. Nowadays I like Strauss primarily as an opera composer. He and Mozart are the only major composers whose operas are what I like best. 
Measure of gratitude: Very small. Thank you. 

Igor Stravinsky
The Rite of Spring/Firebird (Pierre Boulez with the Cleveland and Chicago Symphonies)
Three Symphonies (Michael Tilson Thomas, London Symphony Orchestra)
The Soldier’s Tale (Neeme Järvi, Royal Scottish National Orchestra)

Every music student has a moment where they get really into Stravinsky. For me, it happened thanks to Boulez’s recordings of the Rite and the complete Firebird, recordings which I now find a little surgical, a little lacking in ferocity. (Sure wish I could still bring myself to listen to recordings by that miserable toady Gergiev.) But nowadays it’s the neoclassical stuff that I like best: the least ferocious music in Stravinsky’s catalogue. The Symphony of Psalms is one of the greatest pieces of the 20th century, and The Soldier’s Tale would be another if not for the asinine story. Stravinsky is one of the composers I loved in my early 20s that has the most staying power, along with Mahler. And unlike Mahler, there’s still a lot of his work that I haven’t explored. Someday. 
Measure of gratitude: Massive. Thank you. 

Studio de musique ancienne
Palestrina/Victoria (with Christopher Jackson)

One of the relatively few concerts I saw in Edmonton that completely floored me was Christopher Jackson and SMAM performing music by Giovanni Gabrielli with cornetts and all. I bought this disc of music mainly by Palestrina in the lobby afterwards, convincing myself that I’d like it even though it’s purely choral, without any cool old instruments. I was wrong, I wasn’t ready for it at the time. But I sure did come to like it afterwards, and the other records I’ve heard from Jackson and company have also been outstanding, especially their recording of Orlando di Lasso’s Lagrime di San Pietro. 
Measure of gratitude: Middling. Thank you. 

Sun Ra
Space is the Place

The Karlheinz Stockhausen of jazz, I’ve always appreciated Sun Ra’s work as conceptual art more than as music. But that could be partially because my introduction to him came through this album, which is associated with a film I haven’t seen. His earlier music is a little more austere and a little less corny than this. But it’s a fine line between this and P-Funk, and P-Funk isn’t corny. What’s different, exactly?
Measure of gratitude: Small. Thank you. 

The Syrup Trap
Christmas Happens Every Year

This is an album where the volunteer writing staff of a comedy website sing a bunch of Christmas songs using only the words “O Christmas Tree.” I sing one of the songs and I am on the cover. It is effectively episode zero of a podcast I produced with some of these same people, which was a wonderful project I loved doing. A terrible Christmas album, but an interesting objet d’art that I’m proud to have been part of.
Measure of gratitude: Weirdly large. Thank you.

Marty Sammon
Hound Dog Barkin’

My dad brought this home from a business trip to Chicago. Sammon was playing at Buddy Guy’s blues bar; he’s since become part of Buddy Guy’s band. It’s a bonkers thing to say about a self-released album by a guy who I don’t think ever made another, but this might be the best blues piano playing I’ve ever heard. There are elements of the album that don’t hit as hard as the piano soloing, but Sammon is an amazing instrumentalist whose style I could probably pick out of a lineup. Everybody deserves to come in contact with one incredible album that almost nobody knows. This is mine. 
Measure of gratitude: Very high. Thank you. 

Arturo Sandoval
Trumpet Evolution

Sandoval is a musician you get to know when you study the trumpet. He’s a shameless showboat with an impressive high range, and I honestly like that more than I cared to admit at the time. This album finds him doing impressions of other famous trumpeters from Louis Armstrong to Raphael Méndez. I don’t know how he can imitate other people’s tone like that; I always found that with the trumpet you just kind of have to accept the sound you make by default. It’s quite the stunt. But having heard it once I had its number and put it aside. A worthwhile exercise, but that’s all. 
Measure of gratitude: Small. Thank you. 

Carl Saunders
Be Bop Big Band

Another forgotten disc from my trumpeter days. An old teacher sang the praises of this, which was enough to assuage whatever doubts I had because of the graphic-design-is-my-passion album art. It is flawlessly performed big band jazz, but there’s a slick, collegiate quality to this kind of music that I can’t deal with anymore. 
Measure of gratitude: Small. Thank you. 

Arnold Schoenberg
Pierrot Lunaire/Lied der Waldtaube/Erwartung (Pierre Boulez, etc.)

Pierrot and Erwartung are two pieces I absolutely adore, but these recordings really aren’t ideal. Boulez deserves more credit than anybody for bringing the music of the Second Viennese School to people’s ears. But that doesn’t mean his interpretations are always definitive. In particular, he brings in some singers here who just don’t seem invested in the material. Jessye Norman is the exception, but I don’t know that anybody really comes to this for a 12-minute chunk of the Gurrelieder. It is good, though. 
Measure of gratitude: Small. Thank you. 

Shad
The Old Prince
Flying Colours

Shad is a good rapper, but I never find myself listening to his albums start to finish. Some great singles here, though. 
Measure of gratitude: Medium. Thank you. 

William Shakespeare
Henry IV, Part One (Arkangel Shakespeare)

I got this for five dollars at the Bard on the Beach gift shop’s end of season sale. Next thing I know, the Arkangel Shakespeare audiobooks are my preferred way to re-read Shakespeare. I’m not an audiobook person in general, but this has Richard Griffiths as Falstaff, for god’s sake. The Macbeth one has David Tennant as the goddamn porter. Richard II has Grand Maester Pycelle and Inspector Lestrade saying Shakespeare at each other, I mean, come on. These plays were written to be heard. This is the one thing in my collection that isn’t music, but actually it is. Play on. 
Measure of gratitude: Very large. Thank you.  

Dmitri Shostakovich
Symphony No. 10 (Berlin Philharmonic, Herbert von Karajan)
The Concerto Album (David Oistrach, Nash Ensemble etc.)

Shostakovich was a crucial step on my road to Mahler. His fifth and tenth symphonies (and to a lesser extent the seventh, which has one good movement) introduced me to that late 19th/early 20th century massive orchestra sound that I still love. These days, I tend to prefer his chamber music, including the piano quintet that is bafflingly included on this collection of concertos. 
Measure of gratitude: Large. Thank you. 

Sigur Rós
Ágætis byrjun
Takk…

Takk was my entry point with this band, which I love more and listen to less now than I did at the time. I remember buying that disc soon enough after its release that the internet was still debating whether it was up to the standard of the previous two albums. Many years later it’s gratifying to find that this has been cemented as a masterpiece. I loved it from the start. Ágætis byrjun is also great, probably equally great, but Takk is where I live. I seldom listen to Sigur Rós these days. But when I do, after years of listening to Brian Eno and other texture-focussed music, I appreciate it more than ever. 
Measure of gratitude: Large. Thank you. 

Simon Bolivar String Quartet
Ginastera/Dvořák/Shostakovich

The SBSQ is made up of young musicians from the similarly named orchestra, and they play these pieces better than almost anybody. I think this disc was my introduction to the Ginastera quartet, which I love. Really nice stuff. 
Measure of gratitude: Large. Thank you. 

The Smashing Pumpkins
Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness

Here’s one that I didn’t encounter young enough. I see why it’s generational, but this is such an archetypal teenage epiphany album that it really can’t work if you hear it for the first time in your late twenties. Alas. 
Measure of gratitude: Small. Thank you. 

Philip Smith
Principal Trumpet, New York Philharmonic

Smith is a wonderful symphonic trumpeter, but there’s no degree of excellence that could inspire me to listen to this solo trumpet rep ever again. 
Measure of gratitude: Small. Thank you. 

Soft Machine
Volumes One and Two

Given my love for pop songwriting, Caravan ought to be my Canterbury band of choice. But they’re not. Soft Machine, their noisier and less disciplined fraternal twin, wins the day largely because of these first two albums. There is a pop sensibility here, the sensibility of Robert Wyatt and on the first album, Kevin Ayers. But that sensibility is frustrated by Mike Ratledge and Hugh Hopper’s exploratory playing and rhapsodic structures. It’s a perfect recipe. Also, every musician in this band is fun to listen to, which you can never take for granted. I’m never embarrassed about the music that I like, but Soft Machine is one of the only prog bands that I think is entirely, objectively not embarrassing at all.  
Measure of gratitude: Very large. Thank you.

Pain of Salvation
Remedy Lane
Be

In high school I would try to get my friends into the same crazy music I was into. I was oddly successful at this. I’d bring wallets full of CDs to school, each envelope containing a choice disc and a handwritten intro. Pain of Salvation was one of the biggest hits, thanks to the extremely sexy voice of Daniel Gildenlöw. In retrospect, this is some of the tackiest music that I have ever liked. It’s got everything embarrassing about prog and everything embarrassing about musicals all rolled into one artist. I doubt I could make it through one of these nowadays. 
Measure of gratitude: Low. Thank you. 

Mike Patton
Mondo Cane

I wonder if I missed my window to become a true Mike Patton fan. One day I’ll check out the Mr. Bungle albums I haven’t heard, but there’s a hell of a lot more to his work than that, and I’m not sure I’m the kind of person who can hang with that stuff anymore. I do love this album of iconic Italian pop songs, though. I cannot for my life remember what inspired me to buy it. It’s a fun curio, and a really wonderful collection of vocal performances. 
Measure of gratitude: Moderate. Thank you. 

Pink Floyd
The Piper at the Gates of Dawn (Three-disc edition)
A Saucerful of Secrets
More
Ummagumma
Atom Heart Mother
Meddle
Obscured by Clouds
The Dark Side of the Moon
The Division Bell
The Endless River (Deluxe edition)
Is There Anybody Out There? (The Wall Live)
PULSE
Echoes

I grew up in a house with a record collection that contained all of the Pink Floyd albums from Dark Side onwards. For the early stuff, I was on my own. Pink Floyd is the band that kickstarted my fascination with the narratives that a discography tells. I’m as beguiled as ever by the odd sounds on records like Ummagumma and Saucerful, partially because they tell me about the search that this band undertook after Syd Barrett wasn’t able to lead them anymore. I have a higher threshold for the post-Roger Waters material than most fans, because it explicitly tells the story of the band’s acrimonious split. The imperial phase Pink Floyd albums will always be important to me, because they were a massive part of life in the house I grew up in. But those classic records have become less important to me over time. Whereas, my opinion of the more minor records, especially the searching, inventive records of the late 60s, has remained completely stable. They aren’t one of my favourite bands, but the sheer volume of my Pink Floyd collection ought to show that they’re as big a part of my DNA as Jethro Tull. 
Measure of gratitude: Truly staggering. Thank you. 

Porcupine Tree
Deadwing
Fear of a Blank Planet

These days, Steven Wilson has become more of a Prog Rock Saviour than an artist in his own right. His remixes of classic albums by Jethro Tull, King Crimson, Caravan etc. are largely definitive. His solo career is probably the best-regarded body of work of the last couple decades among true nostalgics. I’ve never been able to get into that side of Wilson’s output. But back when he was an indie rock songwriter with a metal band behind him, I could get into it just fine. There are some dodgy lyrics across these two albums (and Lightbulb Sun, which is not among the Survivors despite being my favourite), and some of the music is a little generic. But I can still put on Deadwing and not feel embarrassed, which is more than I can say for some of the other prog from around this time. Wilson’s most valuable contribution to music will always be his production work with Opeth, but this era of Porcupine Tree is a solid second place. 
Measure of gratitude: Moderate. Thank you. 

Lester Quitzau
So Here We Are

Quitzau came to my hometown with his wife Mae Moore once when I was a kid. It was alright. We ended up buying a CD for some reason, and I am oddly fond of the version of “Rollin’ and Tumblin’” on this. 
Measure of gratitude: Small. Thank you. 

Radiohead
The Bends
OK Computer
Kid A
Amnesiac (Limited Edition)
Hail to the Thief
In Rainbows

They’re arguably the most important band of my adolescence, at least for everybody else. For me, they didn’t have a patch on the Decemberists. Or the Mars Volta. Or Opeth. But Radiohead was the first band that I truly loved who were at the center of the zeitgeist. Even so, I was arguably late to the party. In Rainbows is the period album for me, and I was slightly late even to that, because I insisted on waiting for the physical copies to come out. In the meantime I bought OK Computer. The slope steepened from there. Radiohead remains one of the strangest bands ever to become massively successful. An inspiration to us all. 
Measure of gratitude: Very large. Thank you. 

Einojuhani Rautavaara
Sacred Choral Works (Latvian Radio Choir, Sigvards Kļava) 

Certainly one of my favourite albums I ever liberated from work. Rautavaara ought to be more of a household name: I can’t imagine many people disliking his music. The mass that begins this recording is one of my all-time favourite choral pieces. Really lovely stuff, beautifully sung. 
Measure of gratitude: Substantial. Thank you. 

Lou Reed
Transformer

A classic album by an artist I admire enormously, produced by an artist I admire even more, which is nevertheless a “like, don’t love” situation for me. “Satellite of Love” is a jam, though. 
Measure of gratitude: Middling. Thank you. 

Steve Reich
Music for 18 Musicians (Ensemble Modern)
Piano Counterpoint (Vicky Chow, unreleased)

Steve Reich makes truly generous and sunny music in the most pointy-headed way possible. I love it all, and he is without a doubt one of my favourite composers. As a music student, you inevitably encounter his early conceptual pieces: It’s Gonna Rain, Piano Phase, etc. All of that stuff is great, but my real entry point was New York Counterpoint, on a Naxos compilation that I long ago lost track of. The two discs of Reich’s music that made it through to the Survivors are tied to two different facets of my student experience. The underrated Ensemble Modern recording of Music for 18 Musicians is something I bought at the classical record shop closest to the University of Alberta campus. One autumn day in my first year, I uploaded it to my iPod and walked around campus listening to it. Every time the wind swept the leaves into the air, they seemed to be dancing to the music. Four years later, I was in Vancouver, trying to be an arts journalist, making a mini-documentary about the pianist Vicky Chow, whose performance of Piano Counterpoint will always be definitive to me. I’m not even supposed to have this unreleased recording. It was made by my current employer, before I worked for them. They’ll never get it back. 
Measure of gratitude: Enormous. Thank you. 

Fritz Reiner
Rimsky-Korsakov/Stravinsky (with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra)
Respighi/Debussy (with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra) 

When you’re studying the classical trumpet, you inevitably get really into vintage CSO recordings for a while. Their brass section sounds like nothing else. These days I prefer a subtler brass sound in my symphonic recordings, but there’s something thrilling about these performances, even now.
Measure of gratitude: Substantial. Thank you. 

The Residents
The Third Reich ‘N Roll

I was excited to become a Residents person at the age of 14, but this is a) not fun, and b) kind of a facile comment on pop music. There’s probably something in their catalogue that would appeal to me, but this wasn’t a good first impression and there’s a good chance I’ll go to my grave without hearing another Residents album. 
Measure of gratitude: Negligible. Thank you. 

The RH Factor
Strength EP

Roy Hargrove was one of the most important trumpet players of his generation, and if he’d lived longer I feel like he would have been a natural fit for the meme funk scene. Imagine this guy guesting on a Vulfpeck track. In any case, this EP by Hargrove’s funk outfit is slightly tacky, but “Bop Drop” is seared into my head forever, thanks to being in a university jazz band.
Measure of gratitude: Moderate. Thank you. 

Rush
Snakes & Arrows
Rush in Rio

One of the reasons I was so attracted to prog rock as a teenager is because it’s the sound of effort. On some level, you want to identify with the musicians you listen to. And when I was a kid, I was a very hard worker with very big ambitions. There’s no band that fits that mould better than Rush. When Neil Peart died a couple years ago, the story I kept thinking of was how he started taking drum lessons, well into the part of his career where he was widely thought of as the GOAT of rock drummers. We should all be so humble. The late 70s and early 80s albums are what’s dearest to me, closely followed by the synth-heavy albums of the mid 80s. But the two albums among the Survivors date from the time I first got into the band, and they are old and treasured friends. 
Measure of gratitude: Massive. Thank you. 

Herbert von Karajan
Debussy: La Mer, Ravel: Daphnis et Chloé etc. (with Berlin Philharmonic)

I sure did used to buy a lot of old Karajan recordings. Frankly I’m not sure what I heard in them anymore. Some are excellent (I still love his 1963 Beethoven cycle), but an equal number are generic and rote. This impressionist set is somewhat indifferent in my opinion, though the two works represented are abiding favourites of mine. Nowadays I’d default to more recent recordings, not just for sound quality but for better playing. 
Measure of gratitude: Middling. Thank you. 

Kid Koala
Some Of My Best Friends Are DJs
Your Mom’s Favourite DJ
12-Bit Blues
Live From the Short Attention Span Audio Theatre Tour

I liberated these from my employer’s vast collection out of sheer enthusiasm for Deltron 3030, a project Kid Koala was very much the tertiary member of. Nevertheless, he is an absolute virtuoso on the turntables, and one of the defining musicians of this particular bit of earth I live on. But frankly his recent, more ambient music is more mature and satisfying than these early albums. I still like them quite a bit. It’s a discography worth a deep dive into. 
Measure of gratitude: Noteworthy. Thank you. 

King Crimson
In the Court of the Crimson King
Lizard
Islands
Larks’ Tongues in Aspic
Red
Red (remix)
Discipline
Three of a Perfect Pair
The Power to Believe
The Collectible King Crimson, Vol. 4: Live in Warsaw, 2000

King Crimson was never my number one prog band, but they are the one where I understand it least when somebody doesn’t like them. It’s pretty nuts to think that in March 1969 Genesis put out a debut album that sounded like the early Bee Gees, in July 1969 Yes put out a debut album that sounded like a blend of Simon and Garfunkel and Cream, and then in October 1969 In the Court of the Crimson King came out and it was a fully formed prog rock album that we can identify as such in retrospect. There are so few genuine before/after moments in music history. That’s one of them, and it isn’t even their best album. These days I’m most in love with the mid- to late-70s hard rock era that brought us Red (“Starless” is a good candidate for best prog song of the 70s). But there have been times in my life when I’ve loved the antiseptic math rock Talking Heads pastiche of the 80s lineup best. Robert Fripp always said King Crimson was less a band than a “way of doing things.” Truly, it’s several different ways of doing things, all of which I admire implicitly. 
Measure of gratitude: Enormous. Thank you. 

Kraftwerk
Trans-Europe Express

I feel like I haven’t listened to Kraftwerk enough. I love Kraftwerk. I probably like Autobahn better than this, when push comes to shove. But there is something really moving about a bunch of extremely German Germans of the post-war era making an album that points towards the connection and cooperation of all European nations. Also, “The Hall of Mirrors” is creepy and awesome. 
Measure of gratitude: Substantial. Thank you. 

Kronos Quartet
Black Angels
Short Stories

Short Stories really doesn’t register here; I took it home from work and only listened to it once. It’s Black Angels we’re concerned with. The George Crumb composition it’s named after is one of the most extreme and wonderful works of 20th-century chamber music. Totally floored me when I first heard it in university, and it still does. The fact that this disc also contains a spectacular performance of Shostakovich’s eighth (and best) string quartet is secondary. The Kronos Quartet have been involved with some pretty tepid middlebrow projects in the years since this, but the impulse that started the group (specifically, to play Black Angels and other challenging music like it) is one that I wish had been taken up more widely. 
Measure of gratitude: Large. Thank you. 

Mo Lefever
Unposed

Lefever came to Fort McMurray for one of our annual jazz workshops and borrowed my friend’s homemade fretless bass. We all thought that was the coolest shit ever. This album is fun. One song was a CBC Radio theme for some time. 
Measure of gratitude: Small. Thank you. 

John Lennon
Plastic Ono Band
Imagine

I have dined out on my loathing of the song “Imagine” for some years now. And having read Cynthia Lennon’s memoir, the knowledge that while John was exposing radical openness in public he had cut himself off from his first family informs Plastic Ono Band in a not-so-great way. I still love the hell out of these albums. “Mother” is self-indulgence weaponized in all directions with an audacious lack of self-awareness. “Isolation” is one of pop music’s great koans. “Gimme Some Truth” slaps. “Oh Yoko!” is one of the most purely joyful songs ever recorded, and it’s in Rushmore to boot. John Lennon is a basket of problems, but it’s hard not to love him anyway. 
Measure of gratitude: Large. Thank you. 

György Ligeti
Chamber Music (Pierre-Laurent Aimard, London Winds, etc.)

I bought this mainly for Ligeti’s wind bagatelles, which are marvelous and frankly better than their solo piano renditions. Haven’t listened to it for a billion years, but I like it just fine. 
Measure of gratitude: Middling. Thank you. 

Magnus Lindberg
EXPO/Piano Concerto No. 2/Al Largo (New York Philharmonic, Alan Gilbert, Yefim Bronfman)

Liberated from work, seldom played, probably pretty good. Who can say? I certainly can’t remember it. 
Measure of gratitude: Negligible. Thank you. 

Love
Forever Changes

This is famously one of the most unheralded albums of the 60s, to the point where it may in fact be adequately heralded. Remarkably its best and most memorable song is the one that’s not written by Arthur Lee. Bryan MacLean’s “Alone Again Or” is something I find myself humming on a regular basis, even though I haven’t played this for a dog’s age. 
Measure of gratitude: Great. Thank you. 

Corb Lund
Unforgiving Mistress
Hair in my Eyes Like a Highland Steer
Losin’ Lately Gambler
Counterfeit Blues

I’m listening to Corb’s Cabin Fever as I write this, an album I used to have on CD and offloaded because I immediately bought it on vinyl. That’s how great it is. Joni Mitchell is clearly the best Canadian songwriter, but Corb Lund might be the runner up. This particular collection of albums is arbitrary, but every album he’s made is at least a minor masterpiece. Corb used to come to Fort McMurray every summer, but I never saw him because my family was resolutely anti-country. I first encountered him in (fuck, this is the worst) an ethnomusicology class, where I was assigned to give a presentation on Hair in My Eyes Like a Highland Steer. I nailed that presentation. It wasn’t hard. I was an instant convert. Still haven’t seen him live. Someday. 
Measure of gratitude: Massive. Thank you.

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.