orchestra21

Here are the musical artists I heard most in 2009, a group dominated by very good [and generally under-appreciated] independent hip hop from around the world:

With J Dilla taking top play-count honors, you can imagine how excited I am to perform Miguel Atwood-Ferguson’s beautiful orchestral arrangements of his music just over a month from now.

And for those of you wondering why there’s no symphonic music here: I keep my classically-oriented mp3 library separate from the rest of my collection, so that listening is not reflected in my Last.fm profile. If I can find some extra time this week I’ll post a list of the orchestral recordings that caught my ear this past year.