STRANGE PLACE FOR SNOW

Does knowledge of a piece of musics title or it's provenance alter how you perceive it? If you had never heard Debussy's "Skaters Waltz" before and no one told you the title - upon first hearing would you think of winter or more specifically skating? I don't know.
What I do know is that this weather is affecting what Im listen to.
I'm veering away from mainstream jazz and bebop at the moment and edging towards a lot of north European folk influenced jazz (Bjornstad, good old Garbarek, Tord Gustavsen - that sort of stuff). Maybe most traditional forms of jazz are pretty "urban" in their sound, where a lot of the new European stuff is a bit "pastoral" ???I don't know.
By "urban" I'm not meaning that drum n' bass crap that youngsters listen to or vacuous, slack-jawed, baseball-capped feck-wits have pounding out of their cars.
About the most "raucous" thing I've listened to lately is my favourite EST album "Strange Place For Snow". Now why would I pick that? Anyway, it also includes my favourite track "When God Created The Coffeebreak" (hence the blog title [partly] - in case anyone thought I'd abandoned my atheist principles after finding the lord lurking at the bottom of a mug of java).
Also find that when it's cold and icy then some piano solos hit the spot. Been revisiting my Keith Jarrett solo stuff a fair bit (part 1 of the Koln Concert - that would get Douglas Bader tapping his feet).



I'm also "re-discovering" a lot of my music. Don't mean, by that, that I have that many CDs I don't know where they all are (though that is a problem). No - for about a year now I've been listening to my MP3 player with inferior headphones.
It's amazing that given the amount of music I listen to I am fairly unwilling to invest in the kit to listen to it properly. I generally look at money and see an opportunity to buy more music, but this year I decided to invest in a good pair of headphones.
I've always been wary of hi-fi "geeks" or "audiophiles" as I believe they are called. The kind who spend thousands and thousands on turntables, amps, and speakers .... but only have about two albums!! I'm the sort of diametric opposite of that - I'll shell out a fair bit on the music but listen to it on fairly bog standard kit.
Anyway. That was then and this is now... Got a decent set of headphones now.