I like setting small challenges for my own satisfaction.
When I was at school I set myself the challenge to listen to all the songs on my iPod in alphabetical order, I think there was around eight thousand songs on it at the time. It took a while to do and I remember realising my iPod contained seven copies of America by Razorlight, which I listened to, back to back. I’ve never thought about that song the same way since then.
A few years ago the challenge was knitting a huge scarf that turned out to be so big I’ve never worn it. It’s full of mistakes and is much narrower on either end than it is in the middle. I quite like the flaws though, because if it was perfect nobody would believe that I’d knitted it.
Next, I bought a Rubik’s Cube and a book with instructions (sort of cheating, but I was never realistically going to manage it without) and learnt to solve that. I can now solve it in around a minute and a half. This skill hasn’t really come in handy in my life just yet, though I’m not sure why.
I recently bought some juggling balls in order to learn to juggle. This challenge is ongoing and I still can’t juggle.
Now, onto another ongoing challenge...
Around a year ago, I came across a book that had been bought for me by my parents just before I started university in 2011. The Book was The Penguin Jazz Guide: The History of the Music in the 1001 Best Albums and I couldn’t remember having read any of it.
I picked it up and read about a couple of albums I’d never heard of and felt compelled to give them a listen. After enjoying the small number of albums I had listened to, I immediately sprang to the decision that I should listen to all of the albums in the book. I decided that the worst this challenge could do is improve my knowledge of the music and, if I’m lucky, it might show up a little in my drumming. Around a year later, after doing a lot of listening, I’ve now realised that 1001 is actually quite a lot of albums and it might take me a while to listen to them all.
Whilst working my way through the book, I’ve realised that in any list of the 1001 best whatever’s, there will be a lot of things that you enjoy and, inevitably, a number of things that are not to your taste. This is certainly the case with the Penguin Jazz Guide and I thought it would be interesting to start to document some of the albums I enjoyed discovering, as well as some which may have confused me a little, such as The Complete Library Of Congress Recordings with Jelly Roll Morton, which is 8 hours and 39 minutes (yes, I listened to it all) of Jelly Roll mostly talking about his life in New Orleans around the beginning of the 20th century, most of which is surrounded by a faint whiff of bullshit.
Every once in a while I will post an updated list of the albums from The Penguin Jazz Guide that I have listened to so that I can keep track, with a bit of information on some that stood out for me. There will also be a tally that I’ll keep updating as I go.
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