the rix mix

Good taste inhibits musical pleasure.  A long-time acquaintance, a well-known writer on jazz topics, always seems baffled when I post a perfectly-awful piece on Facebook, because he's  familiar with & respects my knowledge of "good" music. If I know what's good, why do I bother with bad?  Bad can be very entertaining, which is good. But I think he's puzzled mainly because I don't say something is bad, I just put it out there. I don't create categories of bad. The fellow also was blessed to grow up in a  home where he regularly came into contact with honest to goodness musical genius. I grew up in a home where, to be honest, nobody really knew much about music,  yet  in a peculiar sort of  way it was a musical household. I knew what kinds of music my parents didn't like, including rock & roll, but I didn't receive tedious lectures on what I should like. I had friends whose parents bitched constantly about  rock & roll & never stopped lamenting the end of the Big Band Era, although that era was over as popular music by 1945 & the so-called Hit Parade was loaded with boring crap until Elvis showed up. If you pressed them, you realized they  meant Glenn Miller more than Count Basie. By the Fifties, anyone who loved great big band music had to make a special effort to hear it, because most of the guys who had played it had become studio musicians, moved to Vegas to perform in show bands, or quit.

Anyway, 2 1/2 minutes of really bad, even ugly music might the most amusing part of one's day.

(Sometimes I do it as "public service." I may like a only  couple of cuts from some silly out-of-print album but as a "preservationist"  I decide to upload  all or most of it.)