David Ayers

Diving off the speaker stacks. Crowd-surfing an audience of four. Did I hear you correctly...? Heh heh.

Harpsichord. Don't pretend it doesn't happen.

Guitar. Forgot to mention guitar. Like most instruments, cool to play but nothing to be gained by hearing it.

So your ideal band is Brian Eno and Sid Vicious? Mine too. I bought a Fender bass once off someone and went round to his house. He was painting canvases - a lot of them. I asked him why was he selling it, had he lost interest in music. He said music was fine but he couldn't stand musicians so he was doing painting instead.

Piano. Sorry. Oh and Paul Chambers. Sorry again. Jimmy Garrison solos are fine though. Oh wait - no they're not. Sorry.

That's right. But those donuts were sooo goood.

British composer Ollie Knussen has a saying that he wants music to enchant for a moment not hypnotise for hours...

In fact I am disagreeing with that criticism...

Yes it does seem more than seven years.

They've hit the spot with this series. With that catalogue it will be like shooting fish in a barrel for another round or two of reissues - Roscoe Mitchell, Billy Bang, Paul Bley, Andrew Hill, Archie Shepp, maybe Glenn Spearman, Jemeel Mondoc, Borah Bergman, maybe Redman/Old and New Dreams (maybe not - there's the Haden box of course), and of course Murray Vol II. I wonder if they will find use for the one- and two-off artists who don't really fit any box?

About 200GB, much of it backed-up CDs. I rarely download now I've converted to streaming. It's either CD or streaming these days, I've (mostly) cut out the mp3 middleman. Like MG I find organizing it incredibly tedious. I lost it all once and painstakingly reconstructed it from the backup - I wondered why I had bothered then and I don't think I would bother now.

Looks like they are being fairly systematic, so where there is a bunch of material I think it will get issued. No Roscoe Mitchell yet either!

I was thinking about this point the other day - how few jazz musicians have managed to keep developing new ideas (as opposed to getting more efficient at exploiting old ones). In some ways my ten minute bursts are just enough to appreciate something which if more were required from me I would tend to regard as business as usual. Finding a personal voice can just as easily mean teaching yourself to play one way and never really changing that much. Many artists I now find I can keep one recording for reference and sell the rest. And in fact I can basically remember how and what they play so I don't even need that one. I think you are right Allen in saying the problem of jazz is built into its commercial-historical form, whether as stabilized 'tune' music or whether as the supposed escape from the template into free. I tend to think Coltrane killed it for most people because no-one has even been able to match what he *did*, let alone match his degree of inventivity in creating ways of working and setting artistic goals. A few others like the Art Ensemble, Cecil Taylor, and some of the Europeans took key steps towards improv, and also saw the risks of improv and in all but a few cases stabilized their own musics. Braxton saw the risks of Chicago and developed formalized ways of getting past the improv impasse. How much room is there for that, though? Hardly anyone ever plays a Braxton composition. You seemed (to me) to be damning those who listen in extended sessions as if this were the only way to remember and they were trying to memorize. That's how I read your "discourse." Anyway, I personally don't think there's any specific value difference between short or long listening sessions. Oh I see what you thought I meant. No that was not it - I listen like that myself, of course. I was talking about the claim you often see in the classical music press (mainly in the letters pages, admittedly) that wants to make a long attention span the measure of understanding music, and I am disagreeing with it by making a claim for in-the-moment listening and suggesting that grasping music has many dimensions, not just the ability to listen for a long time.

I am explaining an idea. That's just normal discourse, not ranting. Role of memory in music? Well, what you can't immediately hear is in your memory. Not just the actual sounds but the specific and general forms, all sense of what can and might be sounded. Do I need to explain further?

Ah, I've often seen it. Well, you can remember it without listening continuously. Classical era symphonies were not necessarily played continuously, but movements were interspersed with other items. They were also frequently used as dinner music, much like jazz. The present mode of concert listening was a C19th invention. I often listen to single movements from a work when I am at home - part time constraints, part preference.

Yes I was packing in too many arguments. I was referring to people in the classical music world who complain that young people don't have the attention span to listen to classical music. These seem to me by definition older people who are attacking the 'youth of today'. I am questioning whether attention span is the fundamental thing in listening to music. Certainly music involves memory, but that might not be a matter of attention span. Understanding and assimilating music involves many things, including memory but also being in the present. And so the derogatory bit is questioning whether the people who congratulate themselves on their own attention spans are actually such great music listeners - it may be that they have learned pieces by listening repeatedly to recordings and now believe that is a function of their attention span. The test of 'attention span' would be whether one can listen to new, very different music. But my sense is that the slightly fogeyish complainers about youth are also the people who love old repertoire and aren't great at coming to terms with the new, because learning how to approach musical works and to understand the various ways in which they work and might matter is not just a question of attention *span* but of modes of attention and - though we always say 'listening' is a matter of 'ears' - of presence, memory and reflection. My sense is that attention lapses when you don't know how something works so you don't know *how* to attend to it. To the extent that any piece of new music might come from unfamiliar rules and processes, the actual *span* of attention is really not the issue. So it may be a sign of misunderstanding music to bang on about attention span. That's my second thought for the day.

On Duke, do not hesitate.

I've noticed people who love serious music often talk about listening in a concentrated way without distraction, and people who love classical talk about the long attention spans which they believe they have and that youngsters of today (they imagine) don't have. I've always thought that people who say these things don't want to admit how often they listen in a distracted and non-continuous way - probably very often if not very very often. I've also realized in recent times how important short bursts of listening are for all sorts of reasons. I often listen in the car, and my journeys are often short, usually a matter of ten minutes. That means I listen to a chunk of whatever is in the CD changer just for ten minutes. Since I have the CDs I tend to work through them in a linear fashion - not like using an mp3 where I might simply select favorites. What that way of listening does is focus me on the passage at hand for just those few minutes. It's a great way of listening. It means among other things I listen to passages that in a long session might seem like the less interesting parts, sections where I might get distracted and start waiting for a 'good' bit. For example, I am listening at the moment to a William Parker's In Order to Survive (Black Saint). When I tried it sitting in front of the stereo I found it wearing - 70+ minutes of sprawling energy, and i didn't have the *time* to give to that - but in the car I hear a few minutes at a time and just listen to those. And I like it a whole bunch more. It's also a great way to 'learn' symphonies - giving time to sections that I otherwise give less attention (or parts near the end I don't always get to....). So my conclusion is that listening in short bursts, with a mind that's fresh (I don't say 'ears'), is one of the most valid ways of learning to listen. I'll add that the classical 'concentration span' guys seem usually to be people who have learned repertoire works by repeated listening to recordings and imagine that this is a function of attention span rather than of repetition - these people seem often not open to new music which demands an ability to assimilate musical processes, not the same thing as 'attention span'. That's my show and tell for today.

I thought all great movies were knowingly camp, but all the earnest mediocre ones only accidentally so. And shit movies like Avatar couldn't be camp if they tried.

Is it better than the real thing? Or is it the real thing? Recorded music is pornography.

I love to go to the opera but I can't bear to watch it on video. I (now) rarely listen to recorded opera either and many of my opera CD sets are unopened. I prefer live music in general but with stage works (ballet too) the best seat in the house as far as I am concerned is actually in the house - and it needn't even be the best. So unlike you I have a very limited desire for opera as home entertainment. Within the question about opera is another topic - voice. Something we never discuss on this board and so I won't start now!

O Sole Mio - massacred in a British TV ad some decades ago.

It's easy: learn to play them then you can hear them however you like!

There is an obsession with old recordings on this board? I did not really notice it. The way I see it, people like what they like because they like it - not because the recordings are old. There seems to be a pretty healthy level of curiosity for newer recordings. And since we are at lashing out about hating the obsessions - I actually hate the obsession of living musicians with recording the old repertoire. What's the point exactly? Is there much new word to be said in Mozart or Beethoven? As for compensation, the artists are probably not getting too much from these boxes, but if there were no re-releases they would be getting nothing at all. And it is interesting that it is you, the main proponent of Spotify here, would bring the compensation question up . Having said this, I have not bought that many "mono-artist, mono-label" boxes, mainly because of the repertoire. Those that I bought, thought - Glenn Gould Bach, Stokowski EMI Icon, Maurice Andre Erato - I really liked a lot. I bought a few other large boxes (Harmonia Mundi "Enlightenment" being one of the recent purchases), and have been on the whole very impressed by them. Well, even in the new releases section of the board old recordings abound. I have no problem with the compensation issue on Spotify or anywhere - but others do which is what I was mentioning. By the way I am hardly lashing out here, am I? I referred to an opinion of mine which is well-known. I wasn't distinguishing between old classical and old jazz recordings in what I wrote - I see the interest in old records as being of a piece across both genres. I do think the obsession with compensation for recordings made over 50 years ago indicates a misplaced priority - it's well known that is my opinion. In the case of classical music, I don't see why older pieces should not continue to be performed - music is a practice not an archive of recordings.

Those boxes are certainly not for me. I move slowly and don't have time. I don't like the old recordings much and I don't like the restriction of the repertoire of the days of yore. I also prefer to support current projects and - as people know - hate the board obsession with old recordings and arguments about (tiny amounts of) compensation for (mainly) long-dead artists. Incidentally no-one ever asks about how much Toscanini or Tortelier's estates are getting from these mass back-catalogue offloads.