Larry Kart

Jim, I don't see how what the Astros did is directly related to "what digital technology and the resulting capability/capacity for seemingly endless data collection and analytics thereof is doing to the fabric of everybody's life. That's how the Astros cheated. Not with paying people off to throw a game, or hiring hit-men or some thug shit like that. No - they Facebooked this shit, simple as that. " What the Astros did was simply a more efficient version of having a guy hidden in the scoreboard with binoculars or a telescope who can read the catcher's signs and relay them to the bench and/or to the batter by discretely moving stuff around on the scoreboard. Digital technology does make such things more efficient/immediate, but the kind of cheating I just mentioned goes way back in baseball -- certainly to the New York Giants in 1951-- and is not an inherently digital-age phenomenon, any more than binoculars, telescopes, trash can lids, and buzzers are.

Shortly after being appointed as the new Secretary of State in 1929, Henry L. Stimson shut down the Cipher Bureau (US cryptanalytic service). Stimson thought that spying on diplomatic messages was unethical, famously commenting: "Gentlemen do not read each others' mail."

And don't forget the dire effects of farting.

Sorry -- I completely misunderstood the thrust of your "think about that" to mean that there was something wrong/unfair about Kirk Douglas living so long and Charlie Parker dying some 65 years before Douglas did.

Apples and oranges?

The Sharpie "Hurricane" model.

Been thinking about my equipment (stereo equipment, that is) since I bought an Audio Technica VM740 ML cartridge a few weeks ago, a notable imporvement over what I had. For some reason my thoughts then turned to electronic interference between components. I have a hefty Marantz integrated amp, a hefty Marantz CD player, a Rega RX-7 turntable, and a nondescript cassette machine. These were stacked on a rack this way: turntable on top, then CD player, then amp, and finally cassette player. Just for the heck of it, I put the CD player on the bottom shelf, and the amp where the CD player was to see if separating those two components by a greater distance than before might make a difference. I thought it did, so I looked up what substances are most resistant to electrical conductivity, and rubber came out near the top. So I went to the hardware store, got several rolls of rubber shelf liner, cut the rolls to fit and placed three sheets under the cassette player (that would be one shelf above the CD player), three sheets under the amp, and two sheets under the turntable just for the heck of it. So the amp and the CD player are now separated by a total of six sheets of rubberized shelf liner, as well as by the shelf that holds the cassette player. Voila! Sonic benefits (at least to my ear) across the board -- definition per se and spatial definition too. Also, my spinal stinosis has been relieved (just kidding). And all for $16 at Ace Hardware.

She was known for doing that.

Maybe not THE greatest session of the many that Jordan recorded for Steeplechase, but it sure is a beauty -- with Philly Joe Jones and David Friesen. Melody upon melody of absolute freshness.

My mistake. In Lenya's powerful 1956 recording, and those (by Gisella May, Uta Lemper, et al.) that came in its wake , Anna's music was not sung down an octave but a fourth. Lenya was still a soprano in 1933 when the work was premiered, but sadly she did not record it back then. The sound of Lenya the soprano was something else.

Weill, Seven Deadly Sins, Kurt Masur, NY Phil, Angeline Roux (Teldec) Work needs to be sung (as written) by a soprano (as it is here) and not an octave lower, as it eventually was by Lenya, Gisella May, and others.

Allen: In this sentence -- "I think he's doing both; the white working working class audience for this music when it was presented as Minstrelsy is both looking for the real thing and for assurance that it's all a pose and not a threat." -- what is the referent for "it's"? "The real thing"? If it's all a "pose" though -- and a pose on whose part? -- how can it also be the real thing? In any case, I don't get "and thinks that as a white guy he can do it better than a black performer." If a black performer were doing it, the whole shebang would be other -- not necessarily better but other. I refer you to the link I posted above to the satirical "Yiddisher Charleston," which popular recording (itself a kind of minstrelsy?) clearly was aimed at and intended to amuse an immigrant Jewish audience of the time. As it happens, a Jewish psychoanalyst I once knew was, in his salad days as a youngish shrink at St. Elizabeth's, assigned (this was circa 1946) to deal with the recently incarcerated and rabidly anti-Semitic Ezra Pound. At one point, Pound performed the "Yiddisher Charleston" for him, in dialect and hopping about in a dance that was replete with exaggerated would-be comic "Jewish" gestures. One feels safe in assuming that the point of Pound's performance was not that he could do the song "better" than the actual Jewish performers who made the recording but to do something "other" -- something that was aimed at making the Jewish doctor who was seeing him every day feel angry or uncomfortable. IIRC, my friend the psychoanalyst said that instead he found the whole thing kind of goofy, sad, and amusing,

Is the singer here merely "referencing [this particular piece of] African-American expression" or, as it seems to me, in effect domesticating/defusing/ even taking ownership of it. BTW, I don't at all get, in this performance, yours and Allen's notion that the performer is "pretending that [his] whiteness can be wished away." Rather, I think he's using that phrase in the name of momentary dramatic authenticity. Given that black laborers down at the docks scene, he just wants to make things sound real.

Allen, I believe in this passage you're overthinking this: "At one point in the tune the obviously-white singer - portraying a black character, and in the midst of warbling about working on the Mississippi River amongst the “darkies” and other happy workers - yells out "turn me loose, there, white man." It is a jarring moment, representing, I would say, a kind of transference of the desire by a white man for artistic freedom onto the 'other,' the black man, in the guise of demanding cultural/expressive liberation. "Set me free," the white singer seems to be demanding, "by making me as black as I am pretending to be." The call is clearly for cultural freedom, though the inescapable minstrel taunt of white men “exposing” black men for their “pretensions” of equality is also obvious. Less apparent is how singer and audience of the time perceived this call for action – was it simply a matter of comic silliness? A "call for cultural freedom" of the part of the white performers? Wading into this bucket of tapicoa for a possible overthink myself, I would say that it's a playful act of (the dreaded phrase) cultural appropriation. That is, the white singer, by voicing the black character's imagined words of protest, in effect takes ownership of/domesticates them. One could say that there's a certain boldness in the singer's folding those words into the ditty, but isn't that essentially defused by the singer's use of them in a "that's entertainment, folks" setting. Further, I think that the act of domestication that seems to me to be taking place here would be at once amusing and soothing to the typical white audience of the time along "even in their uppity moments these folks are (or ought to be) under our control/belong to us." Hey, deep thinkers, how about this? It's from my new book "Take Me To the Mikvah, Mama."

Picked up this 4-CD set the other day at a library sale for a song (so to speak). For some reason I've never been a big Ella fan, albeit a respectful one -- the songbooks by and large seemed to me to place her in an interpretive straight jacket, when it came to scat singing I preferred Sarah Vaughn, etc. -- by when I listened to these 1953-1983 performances, tears almost came to my eyes at the joyful freedom of most of these performances. For one thing, on the several long jam session tracks where she trades passages with instrumentalists like Sweets, Lockjaw, Zoot Sims, Paul Gonsalves, Al Grey, etc., her sheer inventiveness (and it's much more than mimicry) is not only right up there with theirs but also inspires them to respond in kind. Lots of mutual love there. As Ella usually says after a number is received by the audience with a storm of applause, "Thank you, thank you, thank you."

My favorite recording of the Sonatas and Interludes: https://faculty.sites.wfu.edu/louis-goldstein/recordings/sonatas-and-interludes-and-dream-by-john-cage Goldstein has also made some superb recordings of Feldman's music. More on Goldstein: https://faculty.sites.wfu.edu/louis-goldstein/bios

BTW, I remember reading in Metronome in the '50s a parody titled "Jazz At the Mikvah." (A Mikvah is where Orthodox Jewish women bathe to achieve ritual purity after menstruation and childbirth before they and their husbands may resume marital relations.) One of the featured artists was Michigan Racquet, and the soloists played while standing in three feet of tepid salt water. IIRC, eloctrocution was in the cards.

You're right, it's on #8. But I did listen to it yesterday.

Jazzcorner -- I'll listen again to "Jam Blues" from #7. It's probably there but probably sounded more sensational/unusual to me way back when than it does now.

Anahid is also in the string section on this Flip Phillips album from 1992. Very tasty Dick Hyman arrangements that he and Flip worked out together, not soppy at all. Flip also plays some bass clarinet here; as one might imagine, he has a lovely sound.

Stefan Wolpe / Alan Hovhaness ‎– Ten Songs From The Hebrew / Upon Enchanted Ground / Suite For Violin, Piano, And Percussion Label: Columbia Masterworks ‎– ML 5179 Series: Modern American Music Series – Format: Vinyl, LP, Mono Country: US Released: 1957 Genre: Classical Style: Modern, Contemporary TracklistHide Credits A –Stefan Wolpe Ten Songs From The Hebrew B1 –Alan Hovhaness Upon Enchanted Ground B2 –Alan Hovhaness Suite For Violin, Piano, And Percussion

About ten years ago I was at an Arbors recording session at Nola Studios on which my friend Randy Sandke was playing. Afterwards we all retired to Birdland to listen to some music and schmooze. I was seated next to Avakian, whom I'd never met before. Making small talk, I told him how much I had enjoyed the old (mid-1950s) Columbia LP on which his wife had played several AlanHovhaness pieces (my introduction to Hovhaness, these were coupled with Stefan Wolpe's "Ten Songs from the Hebrew"). Avakian was pleased to hear this and seemingly surprised that anyone remembered or had even heard the album. I still have it.

Jazzcorner -- That buzz-bomb moment from Jacquet definitely was on one of the Jam Session LPs, not a JATP album. BTW I caught the 10/2/55 JATP performance at the Chicago Opera House, eventually issued years later as "Blues in Chicago." First live jazz performance I saw. Sitting in the audience at age 13, waiting for the curtain to go up, I don't think I'd ever been more excited in my life. Only time I got to hear Lester Young in person.

A gem indeed.

Anybody have that box? I do and also bought many of the LPs when they came out. Just sat down to listen to the box again after a gap of many years. Quite a trip in a time machine. I'd forgotten BTW what a brilliant -- and unusually long for him -- solo Ben Webster takes on "Just You, Just Me" from "Jam Session #7." I'm still searching, though, for a moment that may exist in my memory only in distorted form. It's on a medium-up track where, in the midst of some vigorous riffing behind an Illinois Jacquet solo, Jacquet does a kind of guttural buzz-bomb imitation, swooping way down from on high. Only track that fits that pattern is "Jam Blues" from "Jam Session #7," but while there is some caloric riffing there and Jacquet does get quite heated, I don't hear the buzz-bomb effect that's stayed in my mind for roughly 65 years now.