Who does one turn to? Johann Sebastian Bach (1665-1750), of course. I needed an aural detoxification program.

To tell the truth, I was going through some other mid-life bumps, changing jobs and a lot more. I said to myself, “Perhaps this seam is mined out, Jeff, and it’s time to broaden your horizons.”

I found myself haunting Used LP stores, lying on a grimy carpet, crawling back under the stacks into the dusty bins of throwaways, looking for obscure vinyl gems of oblique interest, such as “Pete Best’s Greatest Hits Vol III” or “Petula Clark Sings Robert Johnson”. Prior to it, I knew American/British pop/rock music pretty thoroughly, from 1956 on up into the 1980s and 1990s, when I found precious little new music of interest.

In the late 1990s I went through a musical transmogrification. Shostakovich, Fugue in B-Flat Minor (Tatiana Nikolayeva) (1992 version) How I Got from Pop Pap to Bach’s ‘Well-Tempered Clavier’ Shostakovich, Prelude in B-Flat Minor (Tatiana Nikolayeva) (1987 version) ( Photos from the Ukraine/Moldova border by Maya Meshel) Photo: Maya Meshel, Ukraine/Moldova BorderĪs our hearts weep with the innocent Ukrainian victims of Russian aggression, our thoughts turn to Dmitri Shostakovich, a courageous human being and a great composer who lived and worked under the shadow of Soviet oppression.

Bach prelude and fugue in b flat minor