Our experience with music (art, books, dance, food shit anything) is informed by so many other things external to the object of our attention itself; our upbringing, mood, health, the weather, the people we're with, so many things there ain't no math that can graph it uh. This, to me, condemns criticism. If that's not enough, I also suspect that criticism is fraught with danger; the danger that through a negative opinion one might prevent someone from experiencing that thing for themselves and having an interaction with it. For example: while listening to Dave Koz makes me retch (and I consider Mr. Koz to be a cynical, manipulative musician as much as Kenny G. or the Strokes), I'm quite sure that someone else is having a revelatory experience listening to it (as I had such an experience years ago hearing Marion Brown's Afternoon of a Georgia Fawn). For example also I listened to the Schnittke/Kremer again this morning and it left me cold. That's after listening to it dozens of times quite closely in the last 30 days and loving it. No explainin' that.
On a zestier note, I heard guitarist Hans Reichel's Lower Lurum last night and, while most of the music is a bit "tame" for me, I can safely say that the daxophone is an amazing invention - Reichel, an obvious uber-gherkin, wrests an alarming array of voices from this instrument of his own design. Tidbit: HR's also quite an accomplished font designer!
