Rapid Transportation: from the Beatles to Xenakis

Editor and Concept: Daniel Kernohan

by Lawrence Joseph, Dan Lander, Donal McGraith & Vern Weber

with Bill Smith, Alan Stanbridge & Scott Thomson

photos by Herb Greenslade & Bill Smith

A truly alternative look at music lists, not one that merely includes the obvious but shows the connections of popular music to the avant garde, the obscure, the experimental, the quirky, and the adventurous. Herein you will find a list of 500 artists from the familiar to the unknown. A list and a guide to musical pleasure sometimes close at hand and sometimes far afield. The book includes biographical essays of the eight contributors describing their musical journeys of discovery and the joy they derived from that exploration. They discuss the merits and dilemmas of collecting, recording versus live performance, the change of media and the future of music. In addition 100 plus artists receive short and detailed personal evaluation.

....from the introduction by Daniel Kernohan:

"Who needs another book on music? More specifically, who needs another book about baby boomer music by baby boomers. This book is in part a reaction to the spate of books on music that have come out recently: 1000 Recordings to Hear Before You Die, 1001 Albums, etc., as well as the many lists which have been compiled by journalists, bloggers and so forth. It was hearing about the book The Top 100 Canadian Albums and upon seeing this book that a notion came to me that led to this book. So the idea is reactionary. It is a reaction    to these books and is an attempt to provide a counter list to same. In that sense this book is part of the same fad and participates in the same navel gazing that we aging baby boomers are all engaging in.

The four main writers of this book are paired in two half generations. Two are born in the early 50s and two in the early 60s. We all share certain characteristics. We have all amassed very large record collections. Some of us have purged these collections from time to time. While this is evidence of a certain kind of obsessive behaviour, we are also marked by a capacious curiosity. Because we are owners of this obsession we are likely biased and indeed do see it in a very positive light. We all feel enriched by our excessive pursuit of music. So almost by necessity this book is possessed of a categorical imperative, which is we do feel that the reader would benefit as well by seeking out these musical gems. The other four writers add some different perspectives. While one is of a similar age is spent most of his life in Scotland and England. The other three are musicians. Of these we add someone of an older generation who grew up in England and immigrated to Canada and two younger people, one of whom is a woman. These add to the four main writers very similar experience some diversity as well as rather different trajectories.

One other very important characteristic of our musical journey is that it took us far afield, into areas where many folks do not usually go. Our trip leads from the Beatles to Xenakis. It is not a one-way trip from the popular to the avant-garde. It does not necessarily say that the 'end' of the trip is the highest ground achieved. It does not forsake Woody Guthrie for Stockhausen, as though the journey going from A to B is from lesser to greater value. While all of us have spent plenty of time investigating the farther reaches of musical vanguardism in the 20th century, we do not rest there, kick the ladder away and bask in the thin air of musical extremism.

It is not progress. Neither is our trip from low brow to high brow, from simplicity to complexity, from the vapid to the profound. It is a post-modern dilemma of the most typical kind, which is to say it is really the nature of modernism (because post-modernism is just modernism in its latest moment of self-reflexivity) we are exploring. Because of recording everything has become available. The history of music like Bach or Jannequin, was not instantly available to anyone in the 19 th century. Neither was Korean farmer music, Indonesian gamelan, pygmy hocketing or Tex-Mex music. Recordings make the history of music simultaneously present and collapses any distances that would impede hearing the breadth of music in the world."