Nate Dorward

Not to highjack this thread commemorating Mr. Rohmer, but Jean-Luc Godard is still with us. Those French filmmakers live long. Jacques Rivette, Godard, Chris Marker, Alain Resnais - all alive and working and past 75 years of age. Rohmer lived a full life and left us with an amazing series of films. R.I.P. Add Agnes Varda & Chabrol to the list, too. Actually, it's amazing how many of that generation ARE still around, making films. Good ones, too, judging from those I've seen (A Girl Cut in Half for instance).

Arthur's ok, one of the things my kid liked when she was younger that I actually really liked watching with her too. It's far better & cleverer than the original book series. She's also fond of Animaniacs, though I think if you're looking for shows that model good behaviour for children it's not one to go to. In fact that's much of the charm, that it makes fun of anything vaguely edifying (most shows end with the Warners spinning "The Wheel of Morality" to generate an irrelevant lesson for the day). We usually skip over a few of the less amusing segments (never got with the pigeons) but we always savour the sublime Pinky & the Brain and Slappy Squirrel bits. Now she's to the age where she's consuming Buffy the Vampire Slayer...... sigh..... time flies. Definitely NOT kid's stuff.

Missed my own birthday party here.... didn't log in till just now. Thanks everyone!

Lately it's been a pile of Dorothy L Sayers novels (including one that I'm reading aloud to the little one as she's fond of mysteries--Strong Poison, the one where he meets his future amour Harriet Vane & saves her from a murder rap). Judging from the 4 I've read, Lord Peter does have a curious knack for leaving death & destruction wherever he goes--in Unnatural Death he manages to get one person killed & nearly makes it two, while in The Nine Tailors he turns out to have actively (if unwittingly) participated in the murder and in Murder Must Advertise (which marvellously draws on Sayers' own career in commercial advertising for its portrait of the hothouse environment of an ad agency in the 1930s) Wimsey sends a man to his death.

The album this cover pays tribute to isn't jazz, of course. But this album (more or less) is.

Just did a review of it for Paris Transatlantic--link here.

My thoughts on the book are now online here.

Well, I like Kessel (& Spike Jones!) but the point was to get something that would be both enjoyable & also useful as a referencepoint for my daughter's performance. But thanks for the rec anyway.

Thanks for the comments...! Anyone have opinions on DVD versions? The kicker with her participation in the COC staging, by the way, is that all the choir has to be dressed as boys. So it's a trousers role. She seems fine with this, but I gather some of the girls aren't enthused about the prospect...

OK, I know that this is probably a little less... adventurous than most of the postings here. But anyway: my daughter's in the children's chorus in Carmen at the Canadian Opera Company in Jan/Feb. I thought I'd draw on the collective wisdom here & see if members here had some favourite recordings, & also DVDs of stage productions, as I'd like to get her one or two for Xmas. She's already memorized her bits (portions of Act I and IV) but she's keen to absorb the whole thing.

Hirschfield? He's here & there throughout my collection--I think I first heard him on Bennie Wallace's album with Yosuke Yamashita (Brilliant Corners). I think he's on a Bley album or two, also.

True. But you can definitely buy anything by Mark Miller without qualm. & get the Stuart Broomer book while you're at it--it's great.

Yeah--I have both of those, & they're terrific. The second one is unusual in that it makes use of electronics on most of the tracks, & very effectively. It's like a combination of M-Base-style metric funk plus abstract sound-morphing (I particularly like the swarming cloud of sound on the tribute to Alice Coltrane).

Hm... "nice" is a relative term.... I remember this as something of a low point. Does it improve with age/familiarity?

Here ya go:

Well, you heard Debbie Harry's work with the Jazz Passengers? Try Individually Twisted if you can find it (used to be easy to find secondhand). For country & jazz try Buell Neidlinger.

Just got the book in the mail today--haven't read too much yet, just digging in. Looks like a typical Mark Miller book: thorough, thoughtful, tersely but well-written, filling in the historical context without padding the book unduly, & resting on a considerable body of research. There are many quotes from Nichols's writings, too--both the famous essay on Monk & one I'd not seen quoted from before. The discography at the back includes a lot of Nichols's sideman work in dixieland* bands--I've never heard any of this stuff, there's actually quite a bit of it. Anyone heard it & care to comment? Is his presence at the keyboard in this context particularly noticeable? -- There's also a discography of covers of his tunes, beginning with Billie Holiday's version of "Lady Sings the Blues" & going right up to the present. I really love the Savoy recordings, they're worth seeking out: the vocals are quite charming & "Who's Blues" in particular is first-rate. I have them on that great LP with Monk's quartet session with Gryce on the flip. Mark does correct the frequent misidentification of the guitarist as Danny Barker (it's not known who it is, but it's not him). *Mark just wrote to say that actually a lot of these are R&B not dixieland recordings.

Bill--thanks for the compliments about the STN editing--I'm very pleased to be working on that magazine for Pete, as I think he's got a good savvy for interesting features & a strong stable of regular contributors. It's also been a pleasure working with Dan at Paris Transatlantic. That does sound like a terrible experience with having someone else's writing foisted off under your byline! But I have occasionally been forced to do drastic rewriting or adding my own work when someone hands in copy just under the wire & it's got major problems (like obvious factual errors: e.g. a CD review where I know that the personnel information or instrumentation is incorrect)... The main thing here is that unless time really is of the essence it's vital to run the rewrite by the author (the corollary is: if an author wishes to avoid extensive editing, hand in clean, accurate copy well before the last minute). But that doesn't always happen, unfortunately, & sometimes rewriting seems to be more about the editor's itch to stick their oar in....

I liked Adventures of Kavalier & Clay & Wonder Boys--the film adaptation of the latter is also good though it cuts out my favourite chunk of the novel, the family dinner involving the Korean-Jewish daughters & a dead snake. Currently reading: James's The Princess Casamassima (which is a real change of pace after having recently worked through a lot of his 1890s fiction--this one comes off something like a mix of Dickens, Zola & Conrad's Secret Agent) & a pile of Sjowall/Wahloo mysteries.

Oh, I don't mean to be hard on it really. I guess my point is directed at the serious scholars of jazz history on this board (like Allen): just to say there's no point in obtaining the book if you're looking for lots of new material, since it's entirely drawn from previous sources (& entirely the obvious ones). Since it's from a smallish Canadian literary press it might not be easy to obtain in the States or overseas & I just wanted to indicate it's probably not worth the trouble. On the other hand, Mark Miller's many books on jazz for the same press are well worth obtaining, & there is also a book on Braxton by the estimable Stuart Broomer due from them this month. I haven't read the Dick Twardzik bio they put out (discussed elsewhere in this forum).

I've read the book. It contains no new material, IIRC, simply a brief review of the tale of Ornette's NY debut via newspaper clippings, published interviews &c, & a summary of Bourdieu. It derives from Lee's grad-school thesis of a few years prior. Actually, I found it basically uninteresting except for its account of Ornette's RECENT concert performance in Toronto. Surprisingly for a book written by a musician, it contains no musical analysis of note, it's more of a social-studies thing. YMMV, but I wouldn't go searching the book out if you're already familiar with the tale via Litweiler et al.

Advertising dollars. Is that a joke or do you mean that reviewers are really under economic pressure to give everyone they review a pass in these ezines? B/c if that's the case it was be almost equal to payola. AAJ pays? News to me. There are probably less nefarious reasons why the level of music journalism there is generally so terrible (with a few exceptions).

Speaking as someone who's done a fair bit of writing & also editing, thus seeing both ends of this particular dialectic or rivalry, I'd say that the main thing that's important is communication. It's very frustrating for an author to see major changes made without being given any chance to correct or stet them; & it's very frustrating as an editor to feel that you can't check with the author about anything or that the least change will piss them off. The whole process, in other words, requires an intelligent intermediary--i.e. the editor of the press or magazine in question who will relay questions, cast an extra eye over the original text & over the edited text & list of queries, & provide the copyeditor with clear directions about house style & any other imperatives. A budget for fact-checking is nice, too, if it's that kind of text. But as I'm sure most people here can affirm, these things are often rarities given budgets, production schedules & the general belief that proper editing is unnecessary if the author is simply asked to check the proofs extra-carefully (with some authors that's true, but with many definitely not). Lately I've noticed that even proofreading by someone other than the author or editor seems to be considered optional--I was surprised e.g. how many typos I was picking up in Lopate's anthology of American film criticism for LOA. Re: Sidran: Talking Jazz is full of abominably misspelled names, a hazard of transcribed interviews. It's still a great resource. I do think that unedited books are often an insult to the reader, but agree that there are certainly an alarming number of copyeditors out there prone to nitpicking & making arbitrary off-the-wall changes just for the sake of showing that they're "doing their job". One book I worked on for OUP was supposedly copyedited by someone at Oxford--they did exactly 2 things: (1) switching "that" and "which" about (stupid copyeditor's bugaboo); (2) capitalizing "he" and "him" when they referred to Jesus or God. Even obvious typos were left untouched.

Yeah, I still like that album quite a bit (including the vocalese lyrics!), but something went wrong about halfway through This Time It's Love & I never regained interest. Kind of a shame. Has he done good work in recent years? (I had a similar experience with Patricia Barber, whom I rather liked near the start circa Modern Cool but lost track of once it seemed that Blue Note was pressuring her into doing more conventional jazz standards repertoire.) I used to play that Gordon album endlessly on a cheap cassette I had when I was first listening to jazz, which is one reason I liked Elling's choice of cover. I think at the time I was just really floored by the sheer length of the tracks--I wasn't used to jazz albums with really extended performances (I guess I hadn't heard too many in-studio jam sessions at that point).

Hey, good to see. Harris is one talented guy.... [plug warning] if you search the net you'll find an interview I did with him several years ago, just after he moved from the West Coast to NY. I'm glad to see the Canada Day group's coming to Toronto later this month: it's on my calendar...