Music in various flavors

There was music played on the radio and there was the music I listened to in my room. There was music I shared with my friends and there was music I mainly listened on my very own next to a lit candle.

I just watched a concert on TV (www.3sat.de - Themenabend) by Roger Hodgson playing music from his solo career as well as from the time as leadsinger and songwriter of Supertramp.

Our daughter, aged 13 months, played on the floor next to me and looked at me singing along these songs, which I remembered well. It touched me to see her jolting her head slightly to the rhythm of the music also applauding when the audience did. It seemed if she also liked the falsetto voice of Hodgson and the rhythmic and groovin' sound of songs like "School", "Dreamer", "Logical Song", "Sister Moonshine" and others....

I remembered Supertramp's open-air concert in the stadium in Basel in the 80's at a very hot summer day - one of the best open-air gig I ever seen & heard.

Genesis also belonged to the band's whose records I mainly listened to on my own. I thinks I even got the first one from my sister's collection but have bought others my them and also by Mike Rutherford, Steve Hackett and Peter Gabriel.

I was a big fan of Mike Oldfield. His long instrumentals composed and played by himself got to my attention in the 80s with his albums Platinum, QE2 and Five Miles Out. ELP was another of my early favorites.

Black music and Latin music played, in early days, a minor role to me. Of course, I listened & liked groups like Kool & The Gang, Earth, Wind & Fire and artists like Stevie Wonder, James Brown, Aretha Franklin, The Commodores, Lionel Richie. But I maily got to know most of them during the 80s, past the time, when their biggest hits had been released.

Latin music meant Ray Barretto, Ruben Blades, Santana, Tito Puente, Gloria Estefan to me. It also meant Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, Jimmy Cliff & UB40.

Some big (legendary) groups I had never liked, listened or bought records from were "The Who", "Abba", "The Beatles", "The Doors", "Bob Dylon", "Jimmy Hendrix", "Led Zeppelin", "The Rolling Stones", "U2", "Aerosmith", "The Bee Gees", "Miles Davis", "Elvis Presley", "Sex Pistols", "Janis Joplin" or "Johnny Cash".

In the 90s, I bought, among some others, records from these artists:

Tori Amos, Paula Cole, Sarah McLachlan, George Michael, Wilson Phillips, En Vogue, Janet Jackson, CeCe Peniston, Seal, Vanessa Williams, Anita Baker, Eric Clapton, Cranberries, Sheryl Crown, Crash Test Dummies, Gin Blossoms, Hootie & Blowfish, INXS, The The, Lenny Kravitz, K.D. Lang, John Mellencamp, Alanis Morisette, Pearl Jam, REM, Sting, Toad The Wet Sprocket, Robert Palmer, Amanda Marshall, Chantal Krevaziuk, Jewel, Everything But The Girl, Shania Twain, Bryan Adams, Joe Cocker.

Again, this collection of music doesn't show any signature. It was pretty mainstream mix of music with few exceptions. But the exceptions kept growing while the mainstream stuff got less and less.

Somewhere around 2000 I turned my attention to smaller labels and sounds of different flavours. I listened to Electronica, Chillout (Lounge/Downtempo), Smooth Jazz and Nu Jazz.

It was only a logical step that I turned away from terrestrial radio and paid attention to what happened to the radio and musical aspect on the Internet, especially when Broadband got introduced, since it was on the Internet where I gradually began to discover (and rediscover) new sounds, artists and genres.

And it was also a matter of time that I put my own radio project online so that more people could actually listen to music that had hardly been played elsewhere.