1,000 Recordings to Hear Before You Die: A Listener's Life List (1,000... Before You Die Books) [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

What most readers/reviewers fail to recognize is that this book is not about the BEST 1000 recordings it is about recordings you should HEAR. Those who complain that some really great music is missing are missing the point. Buy this book for education and enjoyment not to see how close Moon comes to your top 1000 music recordings ratings of all time.

"1,000 Recordings To Hear Before You Die" represents a challenge Martin Landau and the IMF would love: "How do you present a mere 1,000 musical recordings across all major genres, across an entire century, and sufficiently global as to be credible while not esoteric?"

Put shorter, "Who made YOU the judge? And why are you such a snob?"

There are no upsides to undertaking such a project for the arbiters of musical taste.

While I was duly impressed with Tom Moon's boldness, I was fully prepared to gut him for his shortcomings in selecting these "essential" recordings.

First, the boring stuff:

The book is sorted alphabetically by artist. This presents some difficulty for, say, opera composers, as a given performance of "Madame Butterfly" might be under the composer or the artist. Fortunately, indexes refer to both. Unfortunately, whomever compiled the index (probably that Microsoft Word fella) didn't check for relevance---when I look up Beethoven's 9th Symphony, it takes me to a parenthetical reference to it (main subject: the "Missa Solemnis"), the page where it's truly discussed is not in the index.

As a reference book, this poses some trouble. As a skimmer, it poses none.

Now, let's get to the content.

Many, many genres are represented here. Classical music and opera are given due prominence; country, metal, and Southern Rock are an afterthought; folk is way overrepresented; blues, rap, world, disco, and pop are about right. I'd say this compilation reflects the usual Baby Boomer view of the world of music leavened by a bit of "Empire Records" snobbery.

So how'd the artist and recording selection by genre fare?

Quite well, surprisingly.

Since this is a target-rich environment for the snide, let me praise Caesar before we bury him.

I tested content by looking up some movers and shakers in genres I'm fairly knowledgeable about.

Alternative: The Pixies - "Doolittle"

Okay, that means Moon isn't a fool. You HAVE to include The Pixies, and "Doolittle" was their biggest and most influential album.

Blues: Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble - "The Sky Is Crying"

The best blues guitarist yet produced must be included, but what about this pick? It's quite informed. Though a posthumous release, "The Sky Is Crying" is my favorite SRV LP and contains his best instrumental track (his blazing cover of Hendrix' "Little Wing") as well as the deeply affecting acoustic song "Life By the Drop". The title song was an instant classic and the revised take of "Empty Arms" corrected an awful production decision on an earlier album. I've got to admit---it's a helluva pick.

Hard Rock - AC/DC - "Back in Black"

Missed opportunity here. As seminal as this album was, its immediate predecessor "Highway To Hell" dwarfs it. Doomed lead singer Bon Scott's finest hour surpasses Brian Johnson's clutch performance in the wake of tragedy.

Grunge - Mother Love Bone - "Apple"

Moon's got some grunge cred. This was the album which straddled the glam and grunge eras and gave birth to the sludgy sound of the 90s, for good and ill. Out of it and lead singer Andrew Young's heroin O.D. came Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, and all of their imitators. Nice pick.

Blues - Muddy Waters - "At Newport 1960"

This is my favorite album from the Chicago blues master, the man who invented the modern blues combo. Nice pick.

Metal - Metallica - "Master of Puppets"

Your little sister would pick "The Black Album" of course, but it was "Master of Puppets" which your cassette player melted down over. Nice pick.

Opera - Verdi - "Aida" featuring Leontyne Price

I simply cannot argue with this choice. Verdi's the master of opera, "Aida" in my opinion is his finest, and this 1962 recording is my favorite recording of it. Nice pick, and stop raiding my music library!

There are some quibbles:

1. No Iron Maiden?
2. Britney Spears "Toxic" isn't a recording Kevin Federline needs to listen to before he dies, much less the rest of us.
3. No Dean Martin?
4. The Beatles more essential than Beethoven? (6 albums to 5)

But given the monumental task of pleasing casual listeners and outright nose-raisers across such a spectrum of music, these are minor quibbles indeed.

All in all, a remarkable reference, and one worth building some iTunes playlists from --- well, would you look at that: at the rear of the book are suggestions for just such playlists!

A worthy addition to the audiophile or audiophobe's library.

Coming late to the review party on this book, I will not analyze structure and organization, for others have aptly covered those points. I am impressed that anyone could take on such a monumental project and do as apparently well as he has. kudos.

To make my biases clear from the outset, though, it's worth noting that my areas of special interest and musical knowledge are classic rock (some pop) and classical music (including opera).

This makes my perspective perhaps a little different from others, and from the author's, because he admits up front that his weaknesses are classical and opera. While I can't say I either totally agree with his choices (or recordings of the pieces he chooses), there's really nothing "wrong" with his selections in these areas that I've found -- they're mostly rather "safe" choices that a new listener can't go wrong with, though many of the standards I looked up were very old (granted, to a skilled listener, many OLD recordings are the BEST recordings), but with old tech, you don't get the clearest production of sound and detail that a new listener would obtain from a newer (DDD) recording.

But there are exceptions to that rule. I was quite surprised that he chose Zinman and the Zurich Tonhalle's recording of the 9 Beethoven Symphonies -- Beethoven: The Nine Symphonies. This is a VERY fine recording, but it's of a new edition ("Barenreiter") that still has some critics unconvinced. It's a great recording, and I own it, but there are so many other cycles of Beethoven's Symphonies that have been around for decades and have passed the test of time. While a great recording of a great NEW edition, the Zinman/Zurich cycle is something of a blip in the author's otherwise rule of "safe" and "big name" recordings for classical. Just not the first Beethoven cycle I'd foist upon a potentially new Beethoven convert. The logic escapes me.

One really interesting feature he includes with each choice is a "Next Stop" recommendation of what to try next if you like this work. I find this to be a brilliant idea: sometimes, though, I fail to see the connections, such as going from Handel's _Messiah_ to Bach's _St. Matthew Passion_ (o.k. so far!) and then to Mahler's Sym. 2. Huh? While the Mahler is one of my favorite pieces, I don't understand the multi-century jump, and Mahler's 2nd didn't even make his list of 1000 works (a point I take great issue with). Again, huh?

I'm more encouraged by his classic rock picks. Again, while I don't always agree on what album by which artist, he almost always picks a safe choice that will at least get listeners interested in that particular artist. Good work here.

For pop, I'm a bit lost. One, I'm not up on the latest pop, so it's a bit hard for me to evaluate his choices in this genre, but picking a Britney Spears CD over Billy Joel's entire oeuvre is completely beyond my comprehension.

Lastly, what I'm most looking forward to (and this is why I gave the book 4, rather than 3, stars) is that the author seems to be on the right track (pardon the pun) with his jazz selections, at least as far as I can discern from others' reviews, and that is my note of hopefulness in getting this book because I've been dying for years to expand my Jazz horizons, and this may be just the guide to help me there.

One note of caution on that subject - Lionel Hampton hasn't been only a remarkable jazz artist in his own right, but he COMPLETELY revolutionized the perception and inclusion of an entire instrument - the vibraphone - in Jazz ensemble, and solo, usage. So why doesn't he even merit a single entry into the 1000? All he gets is a peripheral mention of a non-included album he did with Stan Getz.

Thus, I'm hopeful... yet wary.....