OK, that was just weird!

I have an iPod Nano and mostly get to listen to it on long drives in the car. I usually leave it on "shuffle", and my playlist that fits on the Nano is mostly my 5-star and 4-star picks. So it's no surprise that most of the songs are my favorites.

I've noticed that the shuffle feature isn't all that random. It seems to go in spells picking several songs from the same album, then I won't hear from that album for quite a while. Having done a lot of programming, I know it's fairly hard to get a really random shuffle. Since I loaded most of my songs from CDs, all the songs from each CD are close to each other in the iTunes database. So it's not surprising that a not-so-random pick might pick something from the same artist, same album. But it should not pick a song from the same artist from a different album... a mathematical algorithm doesn't know Ali from Aerosmith.

So... today it picked a nice song from Ali Farka Toure called Goye Kur from The Source. Some of the recordings from Toure's older albums are kind of noisy (as far as instruments' parts being somewhat indistinct), and the voices sometimes kind of whiny. But the later ones are very clean and easy to listen to, and I like this one pretty well. Listening to Goye Kur, I thought "That reminds me of that one from The River that I like so much. It would be nice to hear that one." (I don't always remember the names... they're in various African languages.) And when driving, I don't mess with the iPod much - the Nano is way too small for me to read safely when driving. So I just let it pick for me. Well, it picked Ai Bine, the song I was thinking of!

Ai Bine is the first song on The River. It starts off with Ali's electric guitar all alone with some echo, as if it's in a big hall. Then in comes a saxophone, buzzy and low but somehow very pure, also with a little echo. It's not often that another instrument takes the lead in Ali's recordings. I think in this recording there's just Ali's guitar, the sax, a very little bass and drum, and a calabash. The guitar and sax play basically the same melody, much of the time, sometimes taking turns, sometimes in unison. Turn it up on headphones in a quiet room, and it's pure magic - what a way to introduce an album. Toward the end the sax really takes off in some wild solos. This is one of Ali's finest recordings. Really made my day.

What are the odds? Actually, the odds are 816 to 1, because that's how many songs fit on my iPod Nano. That was just weird!