I had a letter from my friend Leo the other day, one of the most interesting men I have ever met. The son of a navvy and a cleaner, he won an exhibition to Balliol to read English and when he arrived in Oxford his Geordie accent was so strong that he was often incomprehensible to mollycoddled posh kids from the south like me.
At that stage, Leo was determined to become a bullfighter, and I will never forget the astonished horror on my Anglo-Saxon tutor’s face when Leo announced that he had been unable to write an essay on ‘The Seafarer’ that week because he had been talking on the local radio station about his ambition. Sadly he never became a matador, and after graduating he bummed happily around for many years, earning a crust as a life-class model. Then he decided he wanted a more ordered life, so he gave up drink, taught himself Finnish (a notoriously difficult language) and became a translator. He has never been anything other than his own man.
In his letter Leo said that he was staggered by the size of my CD collection and by the rate at which I’ve been adding to it. ‘My efforts and energies most definitely go in the opposite direction these days, towards minimalism, chucking stuff out and keeping life as simple as possible.’ He now owns only about a dozen albums and gets all the music he wants on YouTube.
I half envy Leo the uncluttered simplicity of his life but know it wouldn’t suit me. In these anxious times I’ve found tending to my CD collection, as others tend their gardens, a great comfort. I rearrange sections, plan future purchases, weed out the duds and read books on the subject. And when I’m not writing, it’s rare that music isn’t playing in the house.
For those of my disposition I have a real discovery to report. Tom Moon’s 1,000 Recordings to Hear Before You Die (Workman Publishing) is a treasure-trove of knowledge and enlightenment and certainly not to be confused with the greatly inferior 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die (Cassell), a committee effort which boringly rounds up all the usual suspects from Sinatra to The White Stripes.
Moon, a music journalist who has doubled as a professional sax player, casts his net far wider. His slogan is The More You Love Music, The More Music You Love, and in his preface he quotes Duke Ellington’s wise dictum that there are only two kinds of music — good music and ‘the other kind’. Moon’s selections range from the baroque to bubblegum pop, from Mozart to free jazz and from Bach cantatas to gangsta rap. There is world music from every continent, zydeco and blues, opera and country, heavy metal and soul. Every recording he chooses is accompanied by a pithy and enlightening essay, chunky nuggets of info, and recommendations for further listening. It’s a book to last a lifetime of listening.
I certainly don’t agree with the author all the time — which is half the fun. It seems perverse, for instance, to recommend Leonard Bernstein’s orchestral arrangements of two of Beethoven’s late quartets rather than a great recording of the quartets themselves. There is too much rap for my taste, and I would dearly love to encounter a book or magazine feature on the greatest records of all time that didn’t include Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica which is about as enjoyable as having your teeth extracted without anaesthetic. Moon buys the myth that it’s a masterpiece.
But far more often he reveals taste, knowledge, open ears and an alert eye for the unexpected. On the back cover, the great jazz musician Sonny Rollins writes: ‘There are only a few music writers I have respect for. Tom Moon is one of them.’ It is a view most music lovers will heartily endorse.
Charles Spencer is theatre critic of the Daily Telegraph.
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