“A Chinese philosopher, I believe, once defined patriotism as the memory of the foods you ate as a child. Recordings have something of the same quality. Musicians tend to hear them a lot while growing up, much less later on, as the press of their own careers turns them more inward. So the recordings that have really mattered to me, and that continue to serve as musical touchstones, belong more to the past than the present. But each strikes me, now as then, as in some way exemplary, and each exerts the same wonderful pull on the emotions as the foods of childhood. Here, then, in fairly random order:”