Miles of podcasts

Yesterday morning I fired up iTunes to check on my podcasts. (Currently I’m subscribed to just two – “On the Media” and Christopher Lydon’s “Open Source.”) Lo and behold, I saw that, on Monday, Lydon had done an hour on Miles Davis, marking the 50th anniversary of a memorable Miles appearance at the Newport Jazz Festival. I downloaded it to my iPod and listened through my car stereo via iTrip. It was a terrific program, though it would have been better if there had been less talk and more music.

I saw Miles twice. The first time was in 1974, when my friend Jim and I caught him at the old Paul’s Mall, in the Back Bay. Within a year, Miles would begin his infamous drug-induced retirement, and the show was a strange one. A loud, largely anonymous electric band cranked away with no discernible breaks between pieces. Miles, meanwhile, came and went as he pleased, occasionally sitting on a stool to blow straight down into a microphone that was emanating from a six-inch stand on the floor. He’d leave the stage – for all we knew, he’d left the building – only to return occasionally for a few more staccato stabs. What was most memorable was that Jim and I got to shake his hand briefly during one of his forays down the aisle.

Then, in 1981, my wife, Barbara, and I were on hand for his comeback performance at Kix Disco, near Kenmore Square. Miles was in a good mood that night, interacting with the audience in what almost might be described as an expansive mood; for him, at least, it certainly was. The performance was marred only by the fact that we were hard up against a sound tower, which nearly shattered our eardrums.

Anecdotes aside, it’s Miles’s records that have meant the most to me – “Kind of Blue,” of course, but also “In a Silent Way” and his flat-out rock albums, most notably “Bitches Brew” but also such underrated discs as “Big Fun” and “Get Up With It.” The best part of the Lydon program was that he didn’t stint on Miles’s later work, even his much-maligned albums from the 1980s. Indeed, I’m now tempted to check out “Tutu,” the best-known of those albums.

“Open Source” is an example of how rapidly podcasts are going mainstream. When I wrote about podcasting in the Phoenix last December, the technology – which greatly simplifies the process of finding and downloading audio programs from the Internet – was still in its infancy, though it was taking off. Lydon’s embrace of blogging and podcasting for his new radio program recently attracted the attention of the New York Times. And, as David Pogue observed yesterday, Apple Computer’s decision to embrace podcasting in its latest version of iTunes has given it an enormous boost. I can attest that iTunes’s podcasting module is far easier to use than the software I had been using, iPodderX – although, according to this chart, the latter has way more geeky features.

What podcasting promises is a theoretically limitless source of audio on demand, with producers ranging from professionals like Lydon to foul-mouthed amateurs like Dawn and Drew. We’re still several technological breakthroughs away from podcasting (or its successor) overtaking traditional radio. But I never would have heard Chris Lydon and his guests talking about Miles Davis without podcasting. That’s a pretty good start.