David Ayers

And in fairness to me, Larry has posted about Lance before....

I prefer the only moderate threat presented by slow-moving zombies. Incidentally, has anyone seen the new post-apocalyptic series, Falling Skies, on Fox, which just aired the first episode in the UK on Sky? This one is alien invasion and is set in Massachusetts. Walking Dead is set in Georgia. Seems every state will soon have its own apocalypse series.

And if I don't get it what about all the people who *don't* post forty times a week on a jazz bulletin board...

I'm no expert - at all - but based on that image I think your donkey may have gastric problems and you should consult a veterinary surgeon. Does she have any other symptoms?

Some fadeouts, if you turn them up and listen, do lead to a bum note, dull phrase, or other loss of momentum. Little hobby for us all there.

I quite seriously assumed this thread was about Lance Armstrong. I had to do a double take when I read the link.

I prefer the slow-moving ones in The Walking Dead. Gives the actors more acting to do, less running.

Rigamortis? In Latvia maybe.

Jazz musicians can be lazy writers. How is it with a two horn line-up they so often don't write a descant? Two voice writing is hardly rocket science. OT, sorry.

I don't use iTunes much, and I think one reason is that it does absolutely no work for you in terms of identifying things you might like based on purchase and browsing history. Or am I wrong? This is something amazon does very well. I know for example that iTunes has a Sun Ra page. I found it though only from an external link. I would have no idea how to find it from inside iTunes. I find myself wondering if iTunes is a bit of a dead letter. Most of my listening is CD or streaming. My perception of iTunes is part of why I see downloads as a format whose time may have gone. Tell me if I am missing something on iTunes though!

I recently took a look at Pete Stubley's EFI site. In the January update he says he had considered closing the site as his information was no longer current. Having discussed this with others, such as Evan Parker and Barry Guy he has opted to continue and includes a massive update. You can see his problem just from the update. So many new names and labels from recent years, and so very many releases from the established names like Guy and Parker. I am finding our own thread here quite useful just for recommendations - but there seems to be more stuff out there than EVER.

Why are zombies always fully clothed?

Just a pity that Sony or Universal weren't backing it.

I guess my other thought on this is that jazz musicians tend to repeat themselves a lot and there's a law of diminishing returns which can kick in pretty quickly.

if you really *have* to *own* CDs isn't it just better to wait for things to come around, as folks here are saying? Personally I'd look at that $75 as money to go and catch a live performance. Of course you don't want to say what CD it is but sometimes another person can easily locate something if their search methods and/or favoured websites are different from your own....

Strauss without singing has never been my cup of tea. Is not a cup of tea in fact.

Those BN SHMs are the first ever digital transfers to sound more or less immediate. A pity the music is overfamiliar ;-) and a pity that other remasters like this one can't match them.

Yes I get that it is something about the failure to move jazz up to highbrow status, and that having failed...I think. I guess we never really had Wynton here in Europe so it all reads differently over here ;)

Not sure I've got Larry's point but is it this - rattle the jazz cage by saying jazz is pointless fare for middlebrows who think it is art - people pour out to say in a laborious and PO-faced way, 'who are you callin' middlebrow?' - point made, cage rattlers move on to next cage.

Jazz. How is that still a thing?

Keep music live!

The future is in high-res streaming. That's what they tell me in the local hifi shop.

Don't think we've got a thread on this. Anyways...just speeding away from seeing Anthony Sher as Falstaff in Henry IV part one in London. Big concert goer here but live theatre a bit patchier for me. Anyone else lured by the sight of boards being trodden?

Warrior.

Very interesting post -- "...that the doubts about the consolations of musical discourse are there from quite early and get written in ever deeper..." in particular. To this RH probably would reply (from his Shostakovich essay): "But what else is there to go on, in works of art, but their artistic workmanship -- in music, the actual notes? All human experience can be encompassed and expressed in music's actual notes, when they show themselves to be capable of containing what's entrusted to them." That is a point of view that has a lot of appeal to me, but I think you're saying "Hey, not so fast." Thanks Larry. It may well be that the lack of colour in Shostakovich's music is in some ways a limitation of his imagination. It may be. If we set Shostakovich's First alongside Prokofiev's the whole difference can be seen. Shostakovich's 1st is good enough, but it would be really hard to see it as the equal of Prokofiev's Classical, which is not only clever and colorful but a perpetually attractive masterpiece. Shostakovich was about 18 when he wrote his, in 1924-5; Prokofiev was about 25 when he wrote his in 1916-17. Both were written in Russia, and the difference in age and in date of composition can't really be used to explain away the difference, though those things are part of it no doubt. If we compare the more or less contemporaneous Shostakovich 8 (1943) and Prokofiev 5 (1944), both war symphonies, then the 'battleship gray' Shostakovich probably should be thought of as expressing things that the Prokofiev keeps under too much control - the spareness of the Shostakovich and the strangled solitariness of many of the parts is a new rhetoric which I would say very effectively evokes disturbed and hopeless feelings. Of course Shostakovich is hard to read and properly situate. The famous first movement ostinato march of the Leningrad may - in its hollowness and bombast - be a very exact refusal of the rumpy-pumpy evocation of war in something like RVW 6 of 1946, although the dates there matter. What to do with the more traditionally symphonic 5 and 10, which were much favored in the West, the 10th even being conducted by Karajan, the fifth touted world-wide in its time as the apotheosis of the 'Soviet symphony'? Re. the fifth, Shostakovich is reported as saying that he had not found a good way to write a finale. He is also quoted in Testimony as saying that the finale of the fifth was a hollow assertion, 'your business is rejoicing, your business is rejoicing'. That gives us a plain way of thinking about the hollowness of that finale as a dissenting move - but that does not make it listenable. Re. the tenth, the quoted remark that the scherzo was 'a portrait of Stalin' gives us a clue to the purpose of the kinds off remarks assembled in Testimony (wherever they may originate). For the scherzo of 10 surely does not yield any kind of portrait, except a rather cartoonish one. Shostakovich in any case had earlier renounced the tendency in Soviet musical administration to claim that e.g. the bassoon was the capitalist. So the kinds of remarks attributed to Shostakovich in Testimony still participate in that style of public discourse of music, only now they are intended to redeem the author in terms of the new political correctness of the thaw. In the fifth and the tenth then we are left with works that are probably flawed in their adherence to the demands of the Soviet symphonist. That said, Fay recounts the reactions of the original audience to the Fifth. That was all about the slow movement. The audience were even surprised that Shostakovich could write slow music - everything they knew of his work prior to that (and they did not, of course, know the fourth symphony) was more than a little brutal and cold. That slow movement was understood by its hearers to be a reflection of their current situation in 1937, a time of true pain when pain could not be publicly acknowledged or expressed. But that of course is not how we are obliged to feel about this work. I think the coldness and mechanicalness of the satirical early Shostakovich is a key. The clockwork wind-down at the end of the fourth, which appears again in the fifteenth, is a statement about human life and its empty exhaustion. It is a refusal of hope which in the fourth, at least, appears spirited, but which in the fifteenth has become one empty gesture among others. In this sense the later bleakness is drawing out the implications of an attitude to musical discourse, a refusal of its affirmation, which has been present for a long time. None of this obliges us to hear the works in this way. Surely Holloway is right to doubt the comparison of the Preludes and Fugues with Bach (though they are relatively memorable). And a critic who was present at a performance of the fourth which I also attended last year was surely right to state that it was a bit like having Shostakovich sitting next to you and haranguing you. It was at that concert too that an outsider opened a rear door at the auditorium and, as the music sounded, shouted loudly at the shaggy conducter, Jukka-Pekka Saraste - 'Scooby-Doo man! Whooooarrrr!' As the critic I mention noted, the interruption hardly seemed incongruous, just a part of the mayhem. It was a wonderful performance, but the question of what that work really is - and what Shostakovich's music really is - seemed focalised by that weird cry.