Christina Marrs

http://www.myspace.com/marrsgirl

1. When I was little my mother put me to sleep by singing "Baby Face." I attended this concert for free many times. Lullabies are interesting because the person has not yet heard the song with all the harmony and rhythm. They just hear the melody floating in space. If mom sang it to me now it wouldn't be the same. My mind would supply the missing accompaniment in spite of itself.

2. Wayne Shorter's current quartet has Danilo Perez on piano, John Patatucci on bass, and my hero Brian Blade on drums. Satomi and I saw them in a large hall in San Francisco last year. They really throw caution to the wind when they play, as if all four of them are soloing all the time, and taking musical risks so ridiculous that you have to laugh sometimes. But like magic, the end result has all the delicate beauty of a fully composed piece.

3. Pop music is supposedly an impatient, miniature form, but I guess The Roots didn't get the memo. Huge, arching, tectonic plates of sound, entire histories of music unfolding in their own sweet time. At the 2008 Roots Family Picnic in Philadelphia, they actually played three separate times, the third time being about two continuous hours by itself, complete with guest appearances and never flagging for a moment. It was funny to watch from the side of the stage. A couple of times we saw Guestlove playing drums with one hand and texting on his cell phone with the other, alerting the next guest rapper to come to the stage immediately.

4. There were tons of wonderful and obscure bands at 2009's SKIF Festival in St. Petersburg, Russia. Many had never been heard outside their respective homelands. (Highlights for me were Babaa, from Poland, and Stella, from Estonia.) But the real star of this show was the audience. No matter how experimental, or unlike the previous act, any band was, everyone listened closely and reacted to every tremor and ripple in the musical flow with smiles and interpretive dancing. I finally gave up and left around 4 a.m., those nutty St. Petersburgians still going strong.

5. Hard to pick a favorite piece from an oeuvre as masterpiece-filled as Igor Stravinsky's, but Renard, a strange comedy about a fox and a rooster may take the cake. And from the front row in a small Vienna concert hall, with the incredible Ensemble Modern performing, every little note felt earth-shatteringly beautiful.

6. One time drummer Tetsuya Yoshida, after the defection of yet another bassist from his long-running duo Ruins, decided to tour America just by himself. He bought himself a multiple-layover plane ticket, so he would never stay in any city longer than 24 hours, in order to keep the ticket alive. In each city he would borrow not only the drums, but also bass players. In San Francisco the bassist who learned all that impossibly tricky Ruins material was our dear Ed Rodriguez, before he joined Deerhoof. Ed and Yoshida had never met, and there was no rehearsal, they simply walked on the stage, and played an entire set of Ruins songs flawlessly. The treat began when they stopped playing the songs and just improvised. I don't think I've ever heard anything more exciting. After the show Yoshida didn't say anything to Ed, nor did he pay him.

7. Satomi and I emerged from the Powell St. BART station in San Francisco to the sounds of a Bolivian group - guitar, violin, and mandolin - playing a particular type of Andean music called San Juanito. I had only heard this style on record and I was completely stunned. I probably looked pretty strange standing like a statue with tears streaming down while rush hour zipped all around.

8. I was at the end of a semester in Vienna, studying the rarified, abstract, atonal music of Anton Webern, when I saw a poster for a Don Cherry concert. As much as I love Webern, the repetitive, ecstatic, almost trance-inducing collaboration between Cherry and two Moroccan musicians including Hassan Hakmoun, couldn't have been more different from Webern and felt like a godsend.

9. Serengeti & Polyphonic is a hip-hop duo that played before us last time we were in Chicago. Serengeti is the MC and Polyphonic the DJ. If I had had their music described to me beforehand, it would have sounded like a list of things that usually bore me - no instruments, just electronics, the sound washed out with tons of reverb and delay. But life can be funny like that. They were utterly memorable and intense beyond belief.

10. I've never had the opportunity to watch a Deerhoof since I'm usually busy on stage, but I am often treated to the first hearing of many of our songs. They show up in my head for free. The only thing I have to pay sometimes in order to get them to show up is a bit of sleep deprivation. Intercontinental travel or a small fever usually does the trick. It is at these concerts that the songs sound their best, no offense to my bandmates. They aren't really finished, and they're so quiet I can barely even hear them, but that's part of the fun. It's not so different from my mom singing me to sleep.