I’ve got mixed feelings about Beyond Jazz. I like a lot of what they play, but when they play something I don’t like, I really don’t like it. As I type this, they’re playing “Cooldown” by DJ Smash, which is the worst thing I’ve heard all day — sufficiently irritating to send me off to another channel.

And they make it easy to go elsewhere — I have heard the DJ a couple of times, but he’s always been talking about what’s on other channels, or what Beyond Jazz will be playing later in the week, not what they’d just played or what would be on next.

The variability is a bit more than I expected, but I’m sure I’ll be back.

Before I talk about Cinemagic, let me urge you to scroll down and read about what it’s like to fly in space.

OK, welcome back. In some ways, today’s talk at Almaden was appropriate for today’s Bootcamp experience, since most of the music I heard came from science fiction or fantasy movies (“Return of the King”, various “Star Wars” movies, “The Thing”, “Aliens”, and “Escape from New York”, to name but a few).

I was struck by how similar the music was — sure, if I listened, I could usually tell that there’d been a change of movie, but it took pretty careful attention. It did help when they played bits of the dialog between musical excerpts, too.

There was some music from movies in other genres during the day, and even a couple of vocal pieces, but most of the music was what I have to call “pretentious orchestral”.

I enjoyed the day, but there was a lot of repetition, and spending most of the day here was too much. To coin a phrase, “I’ll be back” (yes, I heard plenty of “Terminator”, too), but for briefer visits.