Warren Vaché and Bill Charlap: 2Gether

Ben recommends (April 28th):

Warren Vaché and Bill Charlap: 2Gether

Download: http://drop.io/musook3

Why I Like It
I received this album as a birthday gift from a fellow trumpet player when I was living in London a few years ago. I'd never heard of Warren Vaché, but since then 2Gether has easily become my most played album. From a technical point of view I'm in love with the silky sound of his harmon-muted horn, but it's the simple orchestration (muted trumpet and keys only) and beautiful melodies which I think make this album so great.

This album now also has a more profound association for me as it was playing when my daughter was born, so it will forever be known as Emi's album and it will always bring a smile to my face.

Rating
Programming: 4
Driving: 4
At Home: 5
Overall: 4.5

Note:
I've decided to rate everyone's albums for each of the different ways which I listen to them.

Programming. While I'm at work and supposed to be concentrating. Anything with lyrics automatically scores low because it's harder to concentrate.
Driving. Albums which I can sing to, make me race like an F1 driver, or relax me will score high.
At Home. If it's compatible with the wife, it scores.

Despite Raman's assertion that there are "no halfsies", I'm going ahead with them anyway (Raman, if you don't like it you can double my rating and pretend I'm using [1..10] without halfsies ;-).

Favourite Songs
My favourite song has always been #4, What'll I Do?. Before Emi was born I intended this to be her bed time lullaby but coincidentally she popped out while this song was playing! I guess it was meant to be. What'll I Do? was written by Irving Berlin in 1923.

About the Artists
Warren Vaché is a really old trumpet player. Since that's all I know about him I'll point you to his biography.

Random Stuff
It took me ten minutes to figure out how to type the 'é' in Vaché (I ended up copy-pasting it from a wikipedia article! [though I've since figured out the rather convoluted +x 8 ' e works in Emacs]). This is important because Emi's full name is Emi Céleste, the little kid is going to be pissed at her parents forever for giving her a letter which doesn't even exist in English and her supposedly computer-competent dad can't even figure out how to type).

** EDIT **
About Me
Raman has correctly pointed out that I did not include an "about me" section, I just stood up and started blirting about music. So to avoid relegation to the second division music club, here we go:

I used to describe my musical taste as "eclectic", but since discovering it's actually a town in Alabama (check out the male/female ratio) I don't think it's something I want to be anymore. Sadly I don't think I'm as musically liberal as I'd like to think I am: I hate country and western; heavy metal drives me nuts; shrutis in Indian classical music gives me pains; and if it's played on a radio station by DJs going by "whacko", "spaso", and "doosh" (i.e. "factory" music) it makes my ears bleed. So what do I like? Well everything else really, so I guess that makes me eclectic. Ha. I prefer swing, funk, soul, "other" jazz if it doesn't sound like elevator music, classical (Dvořák rocked out the 18 hundreds)...listing genres is a sucky way to describe musical tastes. Raman, you'll just have to wait for me to upload albums...

I play trumpet in a couple of big bands, so that influences my musical likes pretty heavily (we did a gig last weekend at a retirement village and we played old dance tunes from the 1920s (the kind of music which hasn't been played since the 30s), and I was disturbed at how much I liked playing it!). Lyrics don't do it for me, I'm much more interested in instrumental stuff (rather, I focus on the instrumentation even when there are lyrics) so the standard guitar/bass/drums outfit has to be really great and interesting (i.e. radiohead) before I pay attention.

I live with my wife and daughter in Brisbane, Australia, but when I figure out how to sell my kid for a lot of money I'm moving back to our second home in Whistler, BC, to be a snowboarding bum again.

iTunes and Windows makes me want to kill myself. Mr Jobs, you can make that software as buggy and useless as you want but I'm not switching to a Mac, so please just make it transfer music to my phone without inciting rage. Why is it so hard to add new music to an existing folder? Why does it take three hours to add an already-ripped album? Serves me right for trying to be cool and buying an iPhone I guess, engineers just weren't meant to be cool