The Rest is Noise - YAY
Whether out of rage or joy, Herbie Hancock’s album of the year Grammy win last week for River: The Joni Letterers incited many to pitch a fit. On one side: The academy snubbed the Foo Fighters, Gill, West and Winehouse for a traditional jazz artist - how out of touch are they? On the other: At last, a tribute to tradition, rather than to the hegemony of the Big Four conglomerates.
As a chronically disillusioned music fan who sees far more plastic carnations than red roses in the musical landscape, I am in the latter group. What a relief to see Grammy voters honor a chain of inspiration - Hancock to Mitchell to Guthrie to Coltrane to Mozart - in a seemingly endless era of assembly line “artists” inspired by the U.S. Mint.
The day after the Grammys, I picked up The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (Farrar Straus Giroux, 200 
by Alex Ross, the chief music critic at The New Yorker, and in the spirit of Hancock’s victory, it is
excellent therapy for music zealots feeling abandoned by Judas and Zadok.
Set to the scores of mostly classical composers of the 1900s, Ross recounts one hundred years of Western history and music’s profound effect therein. Structured as a narrative, which even at 540 pages is passionate and comprehensive without being exhaustive, Noise makes a strong case for contemporary composers of all ilks.
Like all other things these days, corporately produced music is not built to last. As we delve deeper into the epoch of “four minute music” and further from the Beethoven concertos deep-seated in the earliest form of musical science, the threads of influence weaken and actual musical arrangement loses meaning.
But there is a reason artists like Thom Yorke and Bjork stand out (beyond swan dresses and fauxhawks), and it may have to do with their nods to time-tested composers like Messiaen and Strauss.
Alas, Ross says although timelessness in musicianship (or what it is perceived as) is moving further and further away from the ever tunneling mainstream vision, there are plenty of exceptions, though it requires some effort to find them, and innovation cum tradition will always win out.
Exhibit A: Hancock nabbing Album of the Year. Although the artistic merits and appeal of the other contenders cannot be sneered at, Hancock fused new traditionalists like Norah Jones and Corinne Bailey Rae with tried and true legends Leonard Cohen and Tina Turner for his salute to a similarly celebrated melodious poet, through a blues-tinged jazz lens. The award is a statement congruent with Ross’: lots of green doesn’t make you an evergreen.
Though not for everyone, The Rest is Noise is chicken soup for the souls of Grade A music fans and history buffs, and will bolster your aptitude for an increasingly arduous task: separating the splendor from the noise.
Tyler.
