Seeding Pandora: Moondog

I would love to have good music playing at work all the time, because good music is better than crushing silence, but bad music is worse.  Moreover, the music I play must be backgroundable, and not grab my attention away from my work because (1) it's so awesome I have to stop everything and listen, or (2) it's so awful I have to get rid of it immediately.  I don't have time to fiddle with CDs, or construct playlists, and most streaming programming on the Internet commits offense #2.  But in my initial forays into streaming from Pandora, I've been able to program long stretches of backgroundable music with very little effort.  On Pandora you create "radio stations" based on a song or artist, then Pandora plays a stream of music by that artist (if they have the streaming rights) and/or similar artists, similarity being determined by proximity in the Music Genome Project, a huge database of artist and song characteristics as input by "a group of musicians and music-loving technologists."  You can give each song in the stream a thumbs-up or thumbs-down (or do nothing if you're busy working); a thumbs-down will stop the song immediately and remove it from your playlist forever.  Presumably the thumbs will fine-tune the whole Genome thingamajig, Web 2.0-style.  The catch is you can only skip three songs per hour.  On the other hand, you can create a "Quick Mix" to combine several stations into a single stream.  I've gotten great backgroundable streams with a Quick Mix of Moondog, Michael Nyman, Jon Hassell, Japancakes, Popol Vuh, Herbie Mann, and Bill Laswell.  Only occasionally do I have to bring up the Pandora tab on my browser to get rid of some insipid New Age shite like Jim Brickman or David Lanz.  So here's a Moondog song, "Bird's Lament," which frequently turns up on TV and radio in advertisements or opening sequences:

Moondog (Louis Hardin, 1916-1999) first recorded this homage to Charlie Parker for his self-titled 1969 album for Columbia, with an orchestra; this version was recorded with just saxophones and percussion for his 1997 album Sax Pax for a Sax.  Of all the Moondog information available on the web, the best by far is a 1998 interview of Moondog by Jason Gross at Perfect Sound Forever.  Moondog was a fascinating man who led an incredible life, and left behind a nice body of beautiful music unlike any other.

Pandora is promoted as a music discovery tool, but you have to sit there and listen to it.  That's fine for protracted listening, but not ideal for sampling and discovery.  There are several graphical music discovery tools on the web, all neatly summarized on the Rocketsurgeon blog.  I haven't had a lot of luck with those either; finding my favorite bands on MySpace and seeing who their friends are has been much more rewarding, discovery-wise.