an ignorance

If someone could just point me at the jazz album which shows the military euphoria of the 1812 Overture … actually, seriously, I don’t know jazz, and if you could point me at some interesting music I’d give it a go. I’ll accept that dictum on free jazz—what works in one form is rarely right for another. I seem to have suffered too many concerts involving a group of musicians indulging in instrumental masturbation, and not much else—I hate it when the improvisation is as predictable as a conversation with the tax–man. I have been to a couple of concerts where the music was superb, but they are *so* rare.

I dislike Rachmaninov—his music is superbly constructed with immense skill, yet the result is crude emotional manipulation of the kind I associate with nasty Hollywood blockbusters—like a perfectly blown glass sledgehammer.