In My Changer, 7/20/03 — Baking Special!

This weekend I have been doing an unusual amount of baking, making up a blueberry pie for my pops on his Father's Day (Observed) and whipping up some toffee-chocolate chip cookies for two co-workers who have returned from grueling three-week stints in Southern California, formerly the Land of Exotic Newcastle Disease and now the Land of Pretty Well Controlled Exotic Newcastle Disease. (APHIS rules!) This has led me to ponder exactly what music best accompanies the task of baking desserts, with its unusual combination of manual labor and mental deliberation in the service of producing for the body, something so rich and tantalizing and satisfying as to shove all dietary considerations to the side. Below are my current Top 5 CDs for Baking Desserts To. This may change tomorrow, but baby, I've still got tonight, and I could conceivably bake something even sweeter to the strains of these albums. I doubt it, though.

John Coltrane

Giant Steps

Atlantic

Buy it here

This classic album by one of jazz's pantheon dwellers gets the nod as an exceptional dessert-making facilitator for several reasons: (1) The astonishing harmonic velocity of tracks like "Giant Steps" and "Countdown" both peps up a baker whose beating may be sluggish and, with the chords combining and recombining to form new things, gets you into doing precise, beautiful mixes. (2) "Naima," a more meditative, lyrical track, is beautiful without being somber; you can't be grave in the kitchen and expect to make something palate-pleasing, but it's always beneficial to have the musical equivalent of the full, round happiness you hope to inspire with your dessert in the air during its creation. (3) Coltrane's "sheets of sound," in Ira Gitler's memorable phrase, foster an atmosphere of inexhaustible abundance that always pumps a good cook up. (4) Paul Chambers on the bass constantly conjures memorable and witty turns of the lower end that, if you have the volume turned up high enough, are still audible while your hand mixer is running.

The Beatnuts

A Musical Massacre

Loud

Buy it here

I don't have too many friends who enjoy hip-hop, but those I have are all wonderful people, and they always seem a little puzzled by my enthusiasm for the Beatnuts. After all, I lead a relatively sedate life, and yet I love these Corona, Queens prophets of guns, thievery, meaningless sex, marijuana, and clubgoing. And what's worse, Psycho Les and Juju (the Beatnuts' component members) don't even rap all that well, never straying much from the barline or providing indelible imagery; in other words, there's no extra-topical interest to the lyrics themselves. But damn if they don't make some great music to bake to.

Two things separate the Beatnuts from similar topic-spitters and give them an honored place in my kitchen. One is their great good humor, which manifests itself in jokes both silly and juvenile at times, and which provides great comfort when you realize that you put in 1/2 tbsp of salt instead of 1/2 tsp; you can do silly things and still be a master, just like these Queens cats! The other is their astonishing musical versatility; it sometimes seems as if Les and Juju can take any snippet of anything and make it into a hip-hop beat, and they can set any mood they desire as well. "Turn It Out," with blazing party horns and a minimal drum track, gets you in the mood to present your dessert masterpiece to a waiting public, while "Muchachacha" makes you feel light and agile yet fully able to deliver that last stroke of the pastry blender to get that fat chopped up if necessary. And the sheer volume of styles, from the Latin pulse of the bilingual "Se Acabo (It's Over)" to the ringing single piano chord of "Monster for Music" to the soaring synthesized (yet still convincing!) strings of "Look Around," keeps your mind on its toes and ready to remember to scrap the bowl before adding the vanilla and eggs. And, as above, you can always tell what's going on even as your mixer is whirring.

Michael Torke

Rapture; An American Abroad; Jasper

Colin Currie, percussion; Royal Scottish National Orchestra; Marin Alsop, conductor

Naxos

Buy it here

Michael Torke writes in what's been called the California minimalist style, which is good because California knows how to party (I am never going to stop making references to that song). However, Torke himself is from Wisconsin, arguably the nation's capital of death by rich desserts (with butter always acting at least as an accessory), so he's got one up on most modern composers in baking terms right there. I just got this disc a couple weeks ago, but it's already proved its worth in the kitchen. Torke's orchestral sonorities wouldn't sound out of place in Beethoven or Schubert, but he uses them to minimalist ends, typically at speed as high as his spirits. "An American Abroad" takes an engaging, agreeable theme on a quite pleasant journey; this may be escapism in today's geopolitical climate, but it's fun nonetheless. "Jasper" finds Torke detouring into academic compositional tricks, but his idiom is so irrepressible that even this cannot keep him down. Finally, Rapture, a large-scale concerto for percussion and orchestra, does exactly what its title implies: with an uncannily helpful compositional technique in which certain rhythms are "shadowed" (composer's term) by certain notes, it exhilarates the listener into submission.

Baking should be a happy activity, full of fun and life — a celebration of the amazing things butter, flour, sugar and a few other things can do when properly combined. The irrepressible joy of Torke's music finds its way into both the motions of baking, which are executed with greater energy and brio than otherwise, and into the products themselves. The well-sprung rhythms also keep you going through tiresome tasks like picking the stems out of blueberries, while the large structures the tiny minimalist motions form remind the baker that each step in the recipe plays an integral role in forming the coherent whole that will dazzle its consumers.

Franz Joseph Haydn

Symphonies no. 59, 100, and 101

Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields; Sir Neville Marriner, conductor

Philips

(out of print)

This spot holds it down for the entire oeuvre of Franz Joseph Haydn, which is full of imaginative adaptations of received forms, some of which ended up as fascinating curiosities and some of which paved the way for later developments. Both of these are good things to be doing in the kitchen, especially when necessity demands invention, as when you need two cups of chocolate chips but only have one or when your (I mean Haydn's) employer Prince Esterhazy just fired your best horn player for no reason. The symphonies get the nod over the string quartets because they're easier to hear over the hand mixer, and Sir Neville's record gets the nod over Sir Georg Solti, Roy Goodman, George Szell, and others in my collection simply because the Symphony no. 100 is so light and effortlessly cheery while still employing the military percussion that spurs a wavering baker to do the job right and put the cookies back in the oven for another minute.

Smokey Robinson and the Miracles

The Ultimate Collection

Motown

Buy it here

I like to sing. I particularly like to attempt to sing falsetto, although I cannot actually do this with any great frequency ever since senior year of high school, when I hit some kind of testosteronal tipping point and suddenly wore out my voice almost immediately whenever I tried to get up high, so high that I could kiss the sky. But when you sing while you're baking, you don't notice how badly you're singing, or indeed notice the fact that you can't sing half of every line of the song you're trying to sing along with. Smokey Robinson wrote some of the most inviting songs to sing that the twentieth century produced, and their perfectly crafted melodies perk up my baking labors just as much as my baking labors remove the embarrassment factor from my attempts to sing those melodies.

But that's just for starters. The Funk Brothers lay down tracks for Smokey that swing just enough to put a slide in your glide without actually knocking anything off the shelves, and while I have an extraordinarily small kitchen, stepping lively is still well-advised. Smokey's intricate wordplay makes you realize that every element of a recipe must have its counter elsewhere (baking soda vs. salt; semisweet chips vs. sugar) and they all must be balanced so that no one can tell that any one ingredient is present. The Miracles' supporting vocals for Smokey remind us that the crust is just as important as the blueberry filling to make a good pie, and the dough is what keeps the toffee and the chocolate chips in the same cookie. But most of all, Smokey himself, with his dual duties to write and sing, reminds us that the flava comes just as much from the recipe as it does from the baker, and it is the baker's job to bring out the flavor inherent in the ingredients and their combination for all to taste. Now if you'll excuse me, I have a pie to deliver to my parents...

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