(Kingston, Ontario, Canada)

This post was going to be about the difficulty of planning travel during a pandemic. But my heart just wasn’t in it: we already read enough about isolation, quarantines, cancellations, and those dreaded words “tentatively scheduled”. I also appreciate that leisure travel cannot be prioritized over more serious concerns. Instead, I’ve decided to write about some of the music I discovered (or re-discovered) in 2021.

Music has continued to be a wonderful refuge from the pandemic. Most of my music purchases this year were on vinyl: at home, it is very easy to enjoy the ritual and warmer sound of vinyl records.

Some records were new to me. One of my favourites was “We Are”, by Jon Batiste. I first saw him as the bandleader for Stephen Colbert, but that is only a small part of his career. While loosely based on the music of New Orleans, “We Are” ranges from jazz, swing, and old-school R&B to hip-hop and gospel. And it is nice to see that it was released on the legendary Verve record label. I wasn’t surprised to see that it has just received a bunch of Grammy nominations. I’ve included a couple of video links – these are probably the most “commercial” of the tracks.

Another record that was “new” to me was actually released in 1978: Earth Wind & Fire’s “Greatest Hits, Volume 1”. I knew some of the songs beforehand, but I enjoyed practically everything on it. It seems to be from the sweet spot of vinyl: it sounded absolutely spectacular on my turntable. Sometimes these compilations would have a token new song that didn’t measure up to the rest. In this case, however, the token new song was “September”: it may well be their best song.

I took a chance on an LP called “Al Zman Saib”, by long-dead Moroccan singer Fadoul. The first track is called “Sid Redad”…but it is actually a startling Moroccan Arabic version of James Brown’s “Papa’s Got A Brand New Bag”. While the LP contains a couple of other covers, even the original songs ae fascinating. Unpolished, to be sure, but the musicians do seem to be having a lot of fun.

The year also saw me rediscover some albums that I originally owned on CD. I’ll be mentioning some of those in a future post, but I’ll focus on one for now: The Beatles’ 1966 “Revolver” LP.

Many people consider it the best album of the modern era, and the songs are of a uniformly high quality despite being incredibly diverse. It’s hard to believe that the Beatles recorded this LP less than 4 years after “Love Me Do”. But even though I’ve heard “Revolver” hundreds of times, listening to again on new vinyl was a revelation. I heard things I had never heard before. Whenever I want a quick jolt of the sound of innovation, nothing does the trick quite like “Revolver”.

If you enjoyed this post chronicling travel of a different sort, stay tuned. I’ll be posting some more music discoveries soon!