Welcome To Winter

At 17:47 GMT today (about quarter to one EDT) the sun reached its southward solstice. Although the days have been short and it has been cold out for quite some time, today is officially the first day of winter. On one hand, it seems as though we are just beginning our descent into the cold and gray, but astronomically speaking, we are already starting to emerge from it.

Like most people who choose to live in the Northeast, I both love and hate this time of year. It's tough to take the shortened days and frigid temperatures that keep outdoor activities to bare minimum. There's not much worse than starting your car in single digit temperatures and waiting for it to warm up, but there are few things I enjoy more than looking outside when I wake up and seeing snow falling under the orange glow of a street light. It's like you're watching the world slow down.

I still remember hardly being able to sleep on nights when there might be a snow day back in elementary school. I could almost sense whether it had snowed or not before I pulled back the curtain to look outside, but that didn't prevent the crushing feeling of gazing upon the naked pavement and brown, frozen grass and knowing that I still had to go into school.

Winter lends itself to a different range of human emotion. I think everyone suffers from some degree of Seasonal Affective Disorder; unless you live someplace where it is warm all year round how can you not? Life is better when the weather is nice and you can be outside. It sucks when you finish work and it's already dark outside. Mowing the lawn beats shoveling the driveway. You'd rather wear sandals than sweaters. A cold beer is better than a hot cocoa.

By the same token, some kinds of music seem more appropriate for the winter. They might be a little slower and more acoustically layered. They might sound sadder and more contemplative. Or maybe they just have words like "Winter" or "Ice" in the title. Anyway, here is a cursory collection of tunes that - for one reason or another - sound like winter to me:

How High The Moon

Yesterday, on the long drive out to Darien Lake (which is just outside of Buffalo) to see Phish, I was tooling around on my iPhone and came across the unfortunate news of Les Paul's passing on Baseball Musings. I only say "unfortunate" because when someone dies, it's always unfortunate, but Paul lived a fantastic life and died at the ripe old age of 94.

If you're a guitar player or fan of rock music, you probably recognize his name from the famous line of Gibson guitars he endorsed, played by legends such as Duane Allman, Dickey Betts, Warren Haynes, Pete Townshend, Peter Frampton, David Gilmour, Keith Richards, George Harrison, Slash, Jimmy Page, Neil Young and Frank Zappa, to only skim the cream of the crop. Chances are, if fancy yourself a guitar player, you either have a Les Paul or have wanted one badly.

If his only accomplishment was pioneering the solid body electric guitar by crafting it out of a four inch thick piece of a railroad track, he would have had an incredibly successful career in the music business. However, that was only the tip of the iceberg. He also invented multi-track recording, which allowed multiple instruments and vocal arrangements to be stacked on top of each other, which is how virtually every album is recorded in the modern day. A musician in his own right, Paul played his regular gig at the Iridium Jazz Club in New York city until within just months of his death, a performance that we urged you all to experience and one I'm ashamed to say I never did.

To learn more about his long and rich life, head over to the Gibson website for a full scale tribute.

There is also a great PBS special on him, which I'm guessing will be re-aired in the near future. Keep an eye out for that as well.

Last night at the Phish show, they stopped briefly before setbreak to acknowledge Paul's passing, explaining that if he hadn't decided that guitars weren't just for background filler in a band, rock and roll as we know it may never have come to fruition. They played a short version of "How High The Moon", which was perhaps Paul's biggest hit and led into Golgi Appartus, a song replete with lead guitar and a beautiful quiet jazzy solo, a signature of Paul's own music. It was a great moment and I thought of all the other concerts going on simultaneously with similar tributes prompting burts of cheers in outdoor amphitheaters across the country and around the world.

The video below was captured during the advent of multi-tracking at which point it was still a novelty, not the standard industry practice. Most songs don't have 26 tracks (except maybe this one) but this video depicts a man far ahead of his time, bright an vibrant, which is exactly how he should be remembered. Rest in peace, sir.

Somewhere there's music,
It's where you are,
Somewhere there's heaven,
How near, how far.

The darkest night would shine,
If you would come to me soon,
Until you will, how still my heart,
How high the moon.