xybert

Well i want to avoid working this morning so i'll do the 'first 18 years' thing. No ratings but i've commented where i've felt like it: 1980: Queen - Another One Bites the Dust 1981: Christopher Cross - Arthur's Theme 1982: John Cougar - Jack & Diane (literally, literally my most hated song of all time. Are you a Cougar bro? Cool Bro.) 1983: Bonnie Tyler - Total Eclipse of the Heart (lol) 1984: Stevie Wonder - I Just Called to Say I Love You (noice) 1985: A-Ha - Take On Me (noice) 1986: Janet Jackson - When I Think of You (don't know it) 1987: Lisa Lisa & Cult Jam - Lost in Emotion (don't know it) 1988: UB40 - Red Red Wine (not a fan) 1989: Janet Jackson - Miss You Much 1990: George Michael - Praying For Time (don't know it) 1991: Mariah Carey - Emotions 1992: Boyz II Men - End of the Road 1993: Mariah Carey - Dream Lover 1994: Boyz II Men - I'll Make Love to You 1995: Mariah Carey - Fantasy (catchy) 1996: The Macarena (lol) 1997: Elton John - Candle in the Wind 1997 1998: Barenaked Ladies - One Week (had a listen and my god i hate that style of vocals. There was a song that sounded like this in every teen movie in the late 90s/early 00s. I now know who to blame.) BONUS YEAR FOR MORE MARIAH = 1999: Mariah Carey - Heartbreaker Mariah Carey and Boyz II Men owned my birthday from 1991 - 1995

Noticed that Josh Berman has a new trio album on Delmark listed on Amazon for release in September. Would quite like to hear something from it, googling around i haven't been able to find anything. One to watch out for though.

One of my favourite songs. Mine = Queen - Another One Bites The Dust

Yes, although i've only really listened to The Short Life of Barbara Monk, which i think is nice but don't really get the hype. I usually keep my opinion on Blake to myself as i feel like, basically, i could be wrong especially as i haven't really listened to him enough beyond that one album, which, despite being a classic... for me, sometimes, often even, i find that the classic album (see KOB, A Love Supreme etc) is not the best entry point for me and it's not until i've explored more of the discography that i go back to the classic and really get into it.

Yeah Tammi Terrell is a heart breaker. I knew the song but only became conscious of her when it was featured on the Guardians of the Galaxy soundtrack. Sad story. Not really a mashup as such, but i used to crack up at a video where someone had synced footage of The Guess Who performing American Woman with the audio from grindcore band Anal C#%*'s cover version. It was absolute perfection, however at some point it got taken down.

The very first batch of US RVG's (1999 I think, not sure how many, I'm not at home at present) came in cardboard slipcases - not sure how many had the covers (probably the first run of the first issue) - above is the slipcase cover Interesting, thanks for that. Same here in Europe (first batch of RVGs with 1999 remastering). On the back in the reproduction of the back artwork of the CD the artist's photo was replaced by a photo of RVG . Now that you mention it, i've seen RVGs with the photo of Van Gelder on the back... might have been second hand ones though where the slipcase had been discarded. At least i hope i didn't buy any 'new' ones that had been resealed minus the slipcase. Anyway, at least now the mystery has been solved for me.

The very first batch of US RVG's (1999 I think, not sure how many, I'm not at home at present) came in cardboard slipcases - not sure how many had the covers (probably the first run of the first issue) - above is the slipcase cover Interesting, thanks for that.

Father's day next week and the missus allowed me get my own gift, so i took the opportunity to order a few perennial wishlisters: Horace Silver - Blowin' the Blues Away Sun Ra - Other Planes of There Larry Young - Into Somethin'

One of the problems with the internet is that it's opinion overload, if you let it be. discussion is good, but i just don't think we're built to process infinite opinions from around the world.

Posting here rather than digging up another RVG thread: something i've always wondered, did this style of cover, with the border, ever actually exist? I've never seen an RVG with the border style cover in the flesh. Around 2006/2007 when i first started ordering them from Amazon US this style of cover was the one shown however when the CD arrived it'd be, er, borderless. Can anyone shed any light? Were CDs with this style of cover ever produced or was it just a promo image thing? Cheers.

One of the things that i like about jazz is that it's relatively unproduced. I do enjoy heavily produced metal, hip hop, industrial, electronica etc but it's a key point of difference with jazz for me. I like the idea of hearing 5 people in a room (or rooms depending on the studio) working together and making something in real time over 1 or 2 days, as opposed to sitting in front of the iMac one at a time and doing their indivdual parts over the course of weeks or months. Of course, with jazz engineering comes in to it, the producer can have an influence and there can be splices of separate takes etc and probably the odd punch in but as i say, relatively unproduced. Off the top of my head i can't think of anything other than those already mentioned. Yeah, this is a huge point. I don't want my personal musical politics to infect too much of either this thread or how I voice my opinion, but the relative subtlety of jazz production has kind of taken on its own character. In a weird way, this posits jazz in-between popular/"sub-high" art forms (since jazz is so deeply rooted in dance musics) and "art music," the documentation of which is usually, well, pretty "documentarian" in nature. (Quotation marks here meant to undercut the potentially incendiary nature of the terms I'm using, since there's really no hierarchy in play here.) I've often wondered about why jazz production has resisted pace with pop when so much of that music has thoroughly invaded the conceptual framework of how jazz is played, and after a certain point, it's evident that it is a choice rather than a random incongruity. In 99% of cases, this is cool and necessary, but in that last 1% of cases, jazz production feels like a box that the music is straining to explode from within. The Blue Series stuff I talked about in the Kamasi thread is one example--if you're going to bring hip-hop into it in such a direct way, then why not just fuck up the stereo image and throw a bunch of random stuff in there? Similarly, if Prime Time is all about sonic convergence and undermining genre conceits, then why not go all out with the production? I know a lot of people hate it, but I enjoy Tone Dialing for this reason. I feel like In All Languages might be the most exciting Prime Time album for this very reason, and Denardo Coleman's production work on both of these records is admirable in that it ventures into territories that Ornette alone would not or could not journey. Speaking a bit to what Clifford said, John Jack's versatility in working with both rock and jazz went a big way toward producing some music that exercised some of the best attributes of both worlds. Dudu Pukwana's In the Townships (co-produced by Steve Verroca, who I'm not familiar with) is extraordinary for this reason--it takes a quintet and turns it into a tiny orchestra. The overdubs and mixing on that record transform it from a "merely good" album of South African experimental dance music to something akin to a free jazz Motown album. Having that many Dudus and Mongezis ping-ponging around the recording is sensational. As for personal preference, I know he's gotten a lot of flak, but I have to hand it to Bill Laswell for being one of the few mainstream producers savvy enough to nuance the (very flimsy) tipping point beyond which jazz freedom and pop production just don't mix. His work with James "Blood" Ulmer, Threadgill, and Ronald Shannon Jackson is excellent, and I hope I'm not one of only a few to really enjoy how much he got out of revising the Miles catalog. That being said, his work with Tony Williams and Sonny Sharrock in particular is just unbelievable. The unreleased remix of Turn It Over transforms that record from a wacky, Metal Machine Music-type curiosity to a killer psych rock record in spitting distance of late Hendrix, MC5, and The Stooges. Interested listeners had already connected the dots, but Turn It Over Redux--with it's more sensitive mix, Macero-like studio trickery (e.g., swapping organ parts between tracks), and genuine understanding of the bottom end (waaaay more Jack Bruce on Redux, for better and definitely not for worse)--is very well-realized. It suddenly crushes both the original mix and Emergency and Ego as the best Lifetime album. His work with Sharrock is similarly great in that it recognizes that, with a player with that much combustibility and power, a light touch is the best. Laswell also understood that Sharrock was playing an electric instrument, and his work on Sharrock's Enemy catalog in particular (Guitar and Seize the Rainbow being the best) is remarkable in how understated it is with both navigating the best tones and sonic environments for Sonny's guitar. I cannot think of another producer "of jazz" (albeit not necessarily a "jazz producer") who understands just how simultaneously versatile and fragile the electric guitar is. Laswell finds the best sounds for Sonny and then just gets out of the way--the mixing just enhances the power of the playing. It's magical stuff. Ask the Ages is of course monumental, and it's interesting in that it undermines exactly the dynamic xybert mentions. The success of free jazz on record is predicated to an extent on the relative fluidity and clarity of the recording--too light and you have zero bottom end, like Spiritual Unity (which, I might argue, actually enhances the spectral qualities of Ayler's playing); too dense and you have Echo or Atlantis, which makes the music closer to Sunn O))) than a Dial recording. Ask the Ages is the odd jazz guitar album that retains the power and suppleness of the rhythm section while surrounding it with a sort of phantom army of overdubs; the overdubs don't get in the way of the freedom, but the recording also doesn't sound arid or slick. Sonny, who sounds strong but weirdly clunky on something like Dance With Me Montana, sounds both sensitive and powerful on Ask the Ages--every bit as expressive as Pharoah. As a guitarist, I can't underestimate just how enormous an impact this had on me when first exploring the sonic possibilities of jazz on record. Good points. Although i was generalising, I hadn't really thought of the Sharrocks, Ornettes or Threadgills, all of which i like. Could probably add some Sun Ra in there and a ton of fusion.

For me, Lehman is one of the few 'jazz' artists that has managed to incorporate a hip hop influence and have it come out in his music sounding organic as opposed to tacked on and contrived. At least, to my ears. He sounds like he grew up listening to hip hop and it comes through in his music naturally as opposed to some contrived mash up. Just my opinion as someone that grew up listening to and loving hip hop and absolutely loathing overt jazz/hip hop cross over projects. Iyer i haven't listened to as much but those first two trio records with Marcus Gilmore on drums were also very good to me in terms of having a hip hop influence without sounding like a corny, dated upon release, behind the curve hip hop-jazz thing. A lot of that is thanks to Marcus Gilmore, who manages to have a hip hop feel without sounding like he's aping hip hop beats. A random side note, not sure if he still does it but Ken Vandermark used to post lists of what he was listening to on his website. I remember seeing Ultramagnetic MCs' Critical Beatdown listed once, and that made perfect sense to me. Again, i hear that influence come out organically in his music without him shouting 'yo yo, yes yes y'all!' in between solos.

One of the things that i like about jazz is that it's relatively unproduced. I do enjoy heavily produced metal, hip hop, industrial, electronica etc but it's a key point of difference with jazz for me. I like the idea of hearing 5 people in a room (or rooms depending on the studio) working together and making something in real time over 1 or 2 days, as opposed to sitting in front of the iMac one at a time and doing their indivdual parts over the course of weeks or months. Of course, with jazz engineering comes in to it, the producer can have an influence and there can be splices of separate takes etc and probably the odd punch in but as i say, relatively unproduced. Off the top of my head i can't think of anything other than those already mentioned.

I was working as a teller at a bank that was robbed. This would have been about 13 or 14 years ago. It was the day before the Easter long weekend. We were closed, and same as every night everyone was frantically rushing to count up their coins and cash and make sure that everything balanced up so that they could go home. I think because it was a long weekend coming up everyone was rushing a bit more and there was a bit of excitement in the air. Anyway, i heard a crash, and it sounded like some poor bugger had dropped their coin tray. I was so focused on getting my own self sorted that i didn't even look up. Then i heard a second crash, and looked up to see the robbers coming in through the back entrance (the first crash was them busting through the first glass door, the second crash was them busting through the second glass door). Everyone got down behind their counters as we were instructed to do, and for a couple of minutes they did their thing before leaving. No one was hurt. We had to stay to be interviewed by the police. We were there for a while, and someone ordered in a whole bunch of KFC for us to eat. A hot lady from HR or whatever dropped me home afterwards.

Ha ha, funny seeing bogan come up here. It's a very specific term, as in, you could be all the things in the above definition but still not be a bogan, and you could be a bogan and be none of those things. It used to be that you had to be from West Auckland as well but i think the phenomena has spread out. Here's the best example i could find (NSFW language): I came across it in a btl comment describing Shane Warne and his recently unveiled 'tasteful' mural Ha ha, Warney definitely has a bit of bogan about him.

Well, i went through my notes a bit. It's basically all on paper, a 'filing' box full of notebooks and ring-binders so unfortunately 'CTRL-F isn't an option. But i did find some interesting stuff. Not ideal but i just took photos because there's no way i'm retyping stuff that's probably of limited interest and slightly off topic anyway. Having said that, i found it interesting going through it all and i might sit down on the weekend and see if there's anything else worth sharing in there. I'm fascinated by how sound is made up of waveforms that have frequencies and it's all so perfectly, insanely mathematical and symmetrical and orderly.

Interesting. So when there is a digital recording that sounds "cold", i.e....... an early digital recording, or say Tony Williams "Young At Heart", the first DSD recording released, is that because it's so clear and precise? To be honest i'm sort of riffing off in to 'why does distortion sound good?' land from a wider perspective, as in when you hit a note on a guitar that's running through a distortion pedal or being played through a tube amp more so than adding distortion to a recording via a plug in, although there is quite likely to be some common ground there (if it is indeed all related to frequencies and harmonics etc which are all numbers). Anyway, take what i'm saying well and truly with a grain of salt but i'll report back once i've dug out my notes.

Interesting that you mention Ornette. I'm often reminded of Ornette when i listen to Konitz's more recent stuff. Getting in to Konitz in 2012 i was kind of surprised by the Konitz/scientology connection. I just did a quick google and am copying and pasting what i posted in an AAJ forum thread here: Random thought; i've noticed there's a bit of a connection between Konitz and Chick Corea. It doesn't seem to get mentioned much. I'm still a relative newbie to Konitz but i've noticed he's recorded a few Corea compositions, at least as late as 1984. Is 'Chick Came Around' from 'Ideal Scene' a reference to Corea? I've seen videos on youtube of them performing together. From what i gather Konitz was involved with scientology to some degree; was it just a dabbling? Is he still a scientologist? None of these questions are in the least bit important and i figure i'm just thinking aloud here but as a Corea fan i was surprised to uncover a connection i never knew about.

Ha ha, funny seeing bogan come up here. It's a very specific term, as in, you could be all the things in the above definition but still not be a bogan, and you could be a bogan and be none of those things. It used to be that you had to be from West Auckland as well but i think the phenomena has spread out. Here's the best example i could find (NSFW language):

Yeah, never seen him live myself but i've seen a few people mention bad experiences with seeing him live in recent years. I guess my take on it is, he's still capable (IMO) based on what i've heard on CD but at 80+ years old he has some off nights.

I remember doing a class on why distortion sounds so good back when i was doing audio engineering. I'll see if i can dig out my notes when i get home. From memory isn't it just that harmonics sound good, and distortion is literally harmonics in to infinity so the ear finds it to be super 'interesting'? Like, harmonics sounds good, infinite harmonics is like pleasure overload. From memory it's all mathematical, and there is an aural difference between tube distortion and other because something something the harmonic sequence generated something something waveform something something everything in the universe is made up of vibrations and waveforms something something i'll wait till i get home to confirm. Sort of interested to see how good my recollection is.

The ocean is screwed, from what i hear.

I really dig the recentish Konitz albums that i've heard. I don't want to say something glib like 'he's continued to grow or evolve or whatever' when i really couldn't quantify that, but i really dig his current sound. I wonder what Desmond would sound like today if he was still kicking?

Wow! I've wanted to get the Hills and the Wheelers for ages. Still keen for the Hill but i've faded a bit on Wheeler lately. Still rate him and everything, not going to trade all his albums but i feel a distinct lack of enthusiasm about listening to him and getting more stuff of his at the moment. It'll probably pass, but i don't want to get the box just for the sake of it and then have it sitting there and/or have it be a chore to get through.