7/4

May 2, 2008 A Taste of the Vast A.A.C.M. Legacy By NATE CHINEN, NYT The Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians has issued a staggering amount of music in its four decades of existence. Here is a sampling: a dozen vital works, drawn from both the recent and more distant pasts. Most are still in print; all are available through online retailers like amazon.com, though in a few cases you might have to settle for a used copy or a digital-only release. Then AIR “Air Time” (Nessa, 1977). The multireedist Henry Threadgill, the bassist Fred Hopkins and the drummer Steve McCall constituted Air, a fantastically open-ended yet deeply purposeful collective that had a profound impact in experimental circles. This is the group’s finest release. ART ENSEMBLE OF CHICAGO “Urban Bushmen” (ECM, 1982). For its sonic breadth and emotional depth, this two-disc live album is among the essential commercial releases of the association’s best-known group. It concludes with the compulsively hummable “Odwalla.” Anthony Braxton “Quintet (Basel) 1977” (Hat Hut, 2000). Though merely a drop in the ocean of available Braxtonia, this concert recording documents a ferocious band, with Muhal Richard Abrams on piano and George Lewis on trombone. ROSCOE MITCHELL “Sound” (Delmark, 1966). This first release by a member of the association is still a stunner. Mr. Mitchell, playing alto saxophone, clarinet and assorted toy instruments, presents compositional forms with varying degrees of flexibility. REVOLUTIONARY ENSEMBLE “The Psyche” (Mutable, 1975). The violinist Leroy Jenkins was the only member of the Revolutionary Ensemble with proper A.A.C.M. credentials, but its practices were clearly aligned with those of the organization, as this classic album proves. HENRY THREADGILL “Carry the Day” (Columbia, 1994). Mr. Threadgill, an alumnus of Air, advanced some of his strongest compositional ideas in the 1990s. The odd blend of timbres on this release — French horn, accordion, tubas, guitars, etc. — remains one of his compelling trademarks. Now MUHAL RICHARD ABRAMS/GEORGE LEWIS/ROSCOE MITCHELL “Streaming” (Pi, 2006). Three masters of structural abstraction at the height of their powers. This studio recording is a study in texture, not only for the percussive elocutions of Mr. Abrams and Mr. Mitchell but also for the improvised electronic commentary of Mr. Lewis, on a laptop computer. FRED ANDERSON “Timeless: Live at the Velvet Lounge” (Delmark, 2006). A rewardingly rough-and-tumble trio outing led by the tenor saxophonist Fred Anderson, a first-wave A.A.C.M. member and the venerable proprietor of the Velvet Lounge, a Chicago nightclub. ANTHONY BRAXTON “9 Compositions (Iridium) 2006” (Firehouse 12, 2007). This lovingly produced 10-CD box chronicles a rare weeklong club engagement by Mr. Braxton, presenting difficult new music for an ensemble of perceptive next-generation interpreters. NICOLE MITCHELL “Xenogenesis Suite: A Tribute to Octavia Butler” (Firehouse 12, 2008). The flutist Nicole Mitchell released this ambitious effort this week, advancing a potently chamberlike body of work inspired by the science fiction author Octavia Butler. MATANA ROBERTS “The Chicago Project” (Central Control, 2008). Though now based in New York, the alto saxophonist Matana Roberts enlisted Chicago sidemen for this strong studio effort, including the guitarist Jeff Parker, an A.A.C.M. colleague best known for his role with the experimental rock group Tortoise. WADADA LEO SMITH GOLDEN QUARTET “Eclipse” (La Huit, 2008). In this well-produced concert film by Jacques Goldstein, just out on DVD, the trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith fearlessly leads his exceptional working band, which prominently features the pianist Vijay Iyer. NATE CHINEN

May 2, 2008 Four Decades of Music That Redefined Free By NATE CHINEN, NYT Muhal Richard Abrams, left, a founder of the organization, with George Lewis, who has written a book about it. "First of all, No. 1, there's original music, only." Those words would have consequences, yielding everything from runic silence to braying cacophony, from open improvisation to orchestral scores. Baubles and bells. Bicycle horns. The rumble of a hundred tubas. Ancient drums and electronic striations, and flashes of full-tilt swing. The pianist and composer Muhal Richard Abrams uttered that statement of purpose one afternoon some 43 years ago, in a meeting on the South Side of Chicago. In the process he laid the groundwork for the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, an organization that has fostered some of the most vital American avant-garde music of the last 40 years. Though noncommercial, often pointedly conceptual and unabashedly arcane, this music has had a profound influence over the years on several generations of experimental musicians worldwide. The scene plays out vividly in "A Power Stronger Than Itself: The A.A.C.M. and Experimental Music," an important book by the trombonist-composer-scholar George Lewis due out from the University of Chicago Press this month. Reconstructing that inaugural meeting from audio tapes, Mr. Lewis conveys not only Mr. Abrams's aim but also the vigorous debate begun by his notion of "original music." (Whose music? How original?) From the start, it's clear, the association expressed its firm ideals partly through collective discourse. Next Friday night another sort of discourse will unfold at the Community Church of New York in Murray Hill, when the association convenes a panel discussion with a handful of its current members, including Mr. Lewis, the multireedist Henry Threadgill and the pianist and vocalist Amina Claudine Myers. The conversation will precede a concert featuring Mr. Lewis and Mr. Abrams in an improvising trio with the trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith. The evening was conceived largely as a celebration of Mr. Lewis's book, which in turn was conceived largely as a celebration of the organization, an African-American body now rooted in both Chicago and New York. Mr. Lewis narrates its development with exacting context and incisive analysis, occasionally delving into academic cultural theory. But because the book includes biographical portraits of so many participating musicians, it's a swift, engrossing read. "I told George, 'It's like you wrote a Russian family novel of the A.A.C.M.,' " said the critic Greg Tate, who will moderate the panel. Mr. Abrams reflected on the book and the organization last week in a conversation on the roof terrace of the apartment building in Clinton where he has lived since 1977. "The A.A.C.M. is a group of individuals who agree to agree, or sometimes not to agree," he said. "Our cohesiveness has been intact because we respect each other's individualism." Mr. Lewis, the Edwin H. Case professor of American music and the director of the Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia University, offered a similar thought. "As I saw it," he said in his office, "here's a group of people who had a robust conversation going on, with basically no holds barred, and yet managed to manage their diversity without falling apart, without falling into factionalism." Such is the basic philosophy of an association once pegged by the jazz critic Whitney Balliett as "a black musical self-help group." Three years ago, as part of its 40th-anniversary celebration, some clearer definitions emerged at a colloquium presented by the Guelph Jazz Festival in Ontario. The saxophonist Roscoe Mitchell began by recalling how the organization grew out of the Experimental Band, led by Mr. Abrams on the South Side of Chicago. "We wanted to have a place where we could sponsor each other in concerts of our original compositions; provide a training program for young, aspiring musicians in the community; reach out to other people and other cities; and have exchange programs," he said. Noticeably absent from Mr. Mitchell's description, and from the language of the early planning meetings, was the word jazz. This was partly in keeping with the arm's length the organization intended to establish between its art and the commercial realm of nightclubs, then the de facto setting for any African-American art music. Partly, too, these musicians were concerned with a breadth of style that reached beyond jazz, to encompass serious classical composition, as well as music from Africa and the East. Having inherited the new freedoms of 1960s jazz innovators like John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman, the artists in this movement were ready for a next step, one they could claim as their own. "This is a book about mobility and agency," Mr. Lewis said. He links this impulse conceptually to the Great Migration, illuminating how the association's first generation came from families that had moved to Chicago from a postslavery South. He examines the continuing debate over the organization's exclusion of nonblack musicians, shedding new light on the phrase Great Black Music, which many in the association adopted. "What a lot of us are looking for," he added, "is a much more open-ended conversation than any simplistic prescriptions of blackness will allow." Pluralism has always been an ideal of the organization. Reporting on a marathon WKCR radio broadcast in 1977, Mr. Balliett quoted one unidentified member, responding to a question of style: "The A.A.C.M. sound? If you take all the sounds of all the A.A.C.M. musicians and put them together, that's the A.A.C.M. sound, but I don't think anyone's heard that yet." The Art Ensemble of Chicago, the best known of the groups affiliated with the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. The utopian tinge of such language was hardly lost on the artists themselves. "If this was to be a revolution," Mr. Lewis writes, "it would be a revolution without stars, individual heroes or Great Men." But the association has had its share of great men (and a few great women): audacious improvisers like the trumpeter Lester Bowie, the tenor saxophonist Fred Anderson and the violinist Leroy Jenkins; visionary composers like Mr. Abrams, Ms. Myers, Mr. Threadgill, Mr. Mitchell and the saxophonist Anthony Braxton. The Art Ensemble of Chicago, the most celebrated of all its groups, has always principally emphasized the elusive chemistry of its players, who in the group's heyday included Mr. Bowie and Mr. Mitchell alongside the multireedist Joseph Jarman, the bassist Malachi Favors and the drummer Famoudou Don Moye. Yet even in the most solitary of settings — the solo saxophone recital, as represented by Mr. Braxton's landmark 1968 album, "For Alto" (Delmark) — the aesthetic of the organization called for something other than the jazzman's heroic voice. For this reason, Mr. Lewis said, the association represents a postmodern ideal: "You're thinking about it in terms of multiple subjectivities rather than a unified subject." Unlike Coltrane or even Ornette Coleman, who each developed a recognizably penetrating sound, these artists largely favored a sense of identity that was protean and slippery. And their resistance to habitual gestures was fierce. "With the A.A.C.M., you're not rooted in a set of simple, codifiable practices," Mr. Lewis said, "but you're rooted in an attitude, in a creation of an atmosphere, in an orientation to experience." Not surprisingly, this approach never enjoyed mass acceptance, though the Art Ensemble of Chicago has always played to large concert audiences. The greater impact of the association has been felt among other artists. It inspired the formation of the Black Artists Group in St. Louis in the late 1960s. And as its first generation gradually relocated to New York in the 1970s, its experimental ethos connected with a larger circle of musicians. One was the alto saxophonist and composer John Zorn, a chief architect of the so-called downtown scene of the 1980s and '90s. Mr. Lewis's book takes a cleareyed view of the historic tensions between the Chicago and New York chapters of the association. Within his narrative those tensions sit side by side, unresolved, as they are in real life. The flutist Nicole Mitchell, a younger member of the organization who now serves as its first chairwoman, suggested as much in an e-mail message this week: "New York and Chicago will continue to be very distinct organizations." But Ms. Mitchell, who lives in Chicago, framed those differences in positive terms. "For example, new members only come through in Chicago, and the A.A.C.M. School only exists in Chicago." She was referring to the organization's educational program, which, as she put it, "continues to fill a gap that is still present today on Chicago's South Side." And she pointed out that the two chapters had grown much more interactive in recent years, partly as a result of events surrounding the 40th anniversary in 2005. Matana Roberts, an alto saxophonist, weighed in as a younger member of the Chicago chapter who now lives in New York. "The Chicago organization and the New York organization have different goals," she said. "The people who came to New York were pretty major performers on an international level, whereas there are a lot of people in Chicago who perform on more of a local level. So I think there has been a lot of misunderstanding. But in the last five or six years, things seem to be pretty well connected." The association's presence in New York can be harder to find than it is in Chicago, but it has grown increasingly pervasive. Certainly its spirit of self-preservation and collectivity can be found in the Vision Festival, presented each June on the Lower East Side by the artist-run nonprofit organization Arts for Art. (This year's event will feature performances by numerous members of the association, including Mr. Lewis.) A related entity, Rise Up Creative Music and Arts, has been presenting performances each weekend this spring, also on the Lower East Side. On Friday the series will feature Ms. Roberts in a solo performance. The association's practices can also be found around the city on a regular basis, thanks to artists like the pianist Vijay Iyer, a nonmember who has worked extensively as a sideman with Mr. Smith and Mr. Mitchell. Both of the albums released by Mr. Iyer last month reflect his deep experience with the organization; one, "Door" (Pi), is a product of the collective trio Fieldwork, which could be considered a sort of unofficial byproduct of the association. (Fieldwork's other two members are the drummer Tyshawn Sorey, who has backed Mr. Abrams in concert, and the saxophonist Steve Lehman, who is now a teaching assistant for Mr. Lewis.) For Mr. Lewis, who began work on "A Power Stronger Than Itself" more than a decade ago as a professor in the music department at the University of California, San Diego, the association presents a continuing story, especially given the relatively recent arrival of talent like Ms. Mitchell and Ms. Roberts. And as he has demonstrated in his own career, the older members of the organization have continued to create and innovate. Mr. Abrams made much the same point. "Certainly there has been great development, and I think at the base of that development is constant work," he said. And at the heart of that work? Originality, of course. Or as Mr. Abrams put it, "The word and the work are the same." Wadada Leo Smith will perform with Mr. Abrams and Mr. Lewis next Friday in New York. Matana Roberts performs on Friday at the Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural Center, 107 Suffolk Street, at Rivington Street, Lower East Side; (212) 696-6681, visionfestival.org. A concert and discussion tied to the publication of "A Power Stronger Than Itself" will be held on May 9 at the Community Church of New York, 40 East 35th Street, Manhattan; aacm-newyork.com. Matana Roberts, one of the association’s younger members.

from Kyle Gann's blog: By Prent Rodgers on May 1, 2008 2:02 PM

I wonder, wonder when..wonder now... ...can we even have an obscure music thread here? There couldn't possibly be anything obscure to a bunch of music hounds.

Should be instructions for a composition! .

No, it's all grim. chains pulled across man hole covers extended technique as a lifestyle pause here and there like Anton Webern no album cover art is good enough grey on grey for contrast old twigs in the dead of Winter wind cold, sky dark .

@#$% %&*!!! ...besides, 30 Rock is on now.

Hey, talk 'bout obscure...she was on Good Morning America today.

For Madonna fans, it was worth the wait.

!!! I think it's a real cool photo/painting, I have it as my desktop now.

I don't think he was experimenting. .

Henry Brant, 94; experimental composer on grand scale PULITZER WINNER: Henry Brant acknowledges applause after a performance in Los Angeles. He liked to use large numbers of musicians scattered in clusters around performance areas, whether it was a concert hall, a reflecting pool or even a river. He also worked as a conductor during the 1930s and '40s and orchestrated film scores for Virgil Thomson and Alex North. By Mark Swed, Times Music Critic May 1, 2008 Henry Brant -- an American maverick composer who added the dimension of space to music by placing musicians in nooks and crannies of concert halls, on boats floating down the Amstel River in Amsterdam or arrayed throughout sports arenas -- has died. He was 94. The Pulitzer Prize-winning composer died Saturday at his home in Santa Barbara, according to associates. Brant's pieces were always events tailor-made for specific sites. A typical example was "500: Hidden Hemisphere," commissioned in 1992 by Lincoln Center in New York in honor of the 500th anniversary of Columbus' voyage to the New World. Brant positioned military and civilian marching bands as well as a steel-drum band around the campus' reflecting pool. The composer, a small man never seen without a baseball cap or visor, was dressed in his usual color-coordinated athletic garb, this time blinding yellow. Much of the music of America's past, its dances and marches and dirges, was played simultaneously. But Brant's ingenious use of the location and carefully engineered counterpoint allowed the ear to accommodate the various musical strands. Music not meant to get along did. Brant often thought big. In 1984, he turned central Amsterdam into a concert venue with "Fire on the Amstel." He needed four boats to carry 100 flutists for a piece that also incorporated multiples of jazz drummers, church carillons, brass bands and street organs. "Orbits," a 1979 work for 80 trombones, at one point has an 80-note chord, half the pitches part of the standard 12-note scale, the other half microtones (pitches that would fall between the cracks of a piano keyboard). In "Ice Field," for which he was awarded the Pulitzer in 2002, he placed sections of the San Francisco Symphony all over Davies Symphony Hall. The full brass section became a jazz big band. Woodwinds squealed as high as they could from the balconies. Facing the audience were gongs, bass drums and steel drums. The oboes and bassoons buzzed in the choir loft. Brant, in concert dress but nevertheless sporting a poker player's visor, improvised on the hall's large pipe organ. All of this gave him the reputation of a kook, even with the Pulitzer. The prize came late in his career. At 88, he was the oldest composer to have won it. But he said in an interview that the most it did for him was to persuade a few more presenters to say, "Well, let's look at this minor screwball music." Nonetheless, Brant was a major figure in American music. He was a noted educator and orchestrator with a varied career that included jazz, conducting and film work. Beginning with "Antiphony 1" in 1953, he was a pioneer of spatial music, and from then on he wrote more than 100 works in which the layout of the performers determined the nature of the music. All music is spatial, he said, because all music must emanate from somewhere. But he was the first composer to devote a career to exploring the expressivity of space. Henry Brant was born Sept. 15, 1913, in Montreal to American parents. His father was a violinist who had studied with Joseph Joachim. Brant had an early musical education and was naturally drawn to the offbeat, designing instruments out of plumbing pipes and cigar boxes. At the suggestion of Henry Cowell -- the experimental West Coast composer who was the first to play the strings inside the piano -- Brant's father moved the family to New York in 1929 to widen his son's musical education. Brant attended the Juilliard School and studied privately with Aaron Copland and George Antheil. In New York, Brant led a double, and sometimes triple, musical life. He wrote the furthest-out music he could come up with -- contrapuntally complex, wildly dissonant and unconventional in form -- but he also became more deeply involved in jazz and popular music and found work during the Depression and World War II conducting on radio and orchestrating for films. Virgil Thomson brought him in to orchestrate his scores for the Pare Lorentz documentaries "The Plow That Broke the Plains" and "The River." After the war, Brant taught at Juilliard, Columbia University and Bennington College in Vermont. He continued film work on the side and orchestrated several notable Alex North scores, such as those for John Ford's "Cheyenne Autumn" and "Cleopatra." However, Brant's name never appeared in the credits. His breakthrough was in the early 1950s when, all about the same time, he heard Berlioz's "Requiem" written for Les Invalides in Paris, the Baroque music of Gabrielli intended for St. Mark's in Venice and Charles Ives' antiphonal "The Unanswered Question." Brant had found his music growing so contrapuntally complex that the result was a mess. These various scores persuaded him that all he needed was a little physical distance between the players. Spatial music offered another important advantage to someone as eclectic as Brant. By strategic placement of different sorts of ensembles, he found that he could coax the ear to accept more than one sort of music at a time. In 1981, Brant gave up academic life and devoted himself full time to spatial music, although he continued to take on occasional orchestral projects on the side, such as orchestrating Ives' "Concord" Sonata, turning it into a symphony, and finishing Schubert's B-minor Symphony. His scale kept getting bigger and his combinations more brazen. "Meteor Farm," from 1982, is scored for two sopranos, three South Indian performers, two choruses, West African chorus, jazz band, gamelan and two percussion ensembles. In 1986, Brant filled a St. Paul, Minn., sports arena with a choir, an orchestra, a jazz band, a wind ensemble, a percussion ensemble, five pianos, a bagpipe band and five solo singers for "Northern Lights Over the Twin Cities." Brant wrote small pieces too, separating as few as three players in three corners of a concert hall. But he always worked the same way, changing the character of whatever venue he worked in by putting musicians where they had never been before. His first task whenever he arrived somewhere to create a piece was to make friends with the fire marshals. An indifference to recording -- the whole point of his music being its geographical character -- is probably what kept Brant's name from being more widely known. It is missing from recent encyclopedic American music histories. But the city of Boston sponsored a "Henry Brant Week" in 1983, which was followed by a week of 10 all-Brant concerts in Amsterdam the next year. In 1994, a seven-hour Brant marathon was held in Groningen, the Netherlands. His archive was acquired by the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel, Switzerland, in 1998, the same year he received an honorary doctorate from Wesleyan University. Brant, though, was ignored closer to home, where he was a resident of Santa Barbara for the last 27 years and an active composer until the end. His work was rarely produced in Southern California. A small work, "Tremors," for 16 instrumentalists and four singers, was commissioned by the Getty Research Institute and performed at the Getty and Walt Disney Concert Hall in 2004, but that was a rare occasion. Brant is survived by his second wife, Kathy Wilkowski; a brother, Bertram Brant; his children, Piri Kaethe Friedman, Joquin Ives Brant and Linus Corragio; and four grandchildren. Funeral services are private, but a public memorial is being planned.

Herbie Mann Halen?

Yes Reveals 'Very Different' New Material May 01, 2008, 1:35 PM ET Gary Graff, Detroit Billboard Even as it prepares for its 40th anniversary tour this summer, Yes is working on new material, frontman Jon Anderson has revealed to Billboard.com. Anderson says the progressive rock heroes are preparing four new songs of the "opus" variety -- lengthy, multi-movement compositions along the lines of "Close to the Edge" and "Tales From Topographic Oceans." "They're very, very different," Anderson says. "It'll be interesting when we perform them, because we know that we want to try and perform them in a unique fashion." But Anderson adds that he's not sure those songs will wind up comprising Yes' first set of new material since 2001's "Magnification." "Putting together an album really isn't logical anymore," he notes. "Putting together a large piece of music or something that is really a jump in a musical direction takes a lot of commitment from everybody.... But maybe during the tour we will discuss making some new music." Anderson says he'd also be amenable to some sort of reunion of the Yes lineup that made the group's triple-platinum 1983 smash "90125" as well as 1987's "Big Generator" and 1994's "Talk." He and Trevor Rabin, the guitarist and co-producer in that incarnation of the band, have been in discussions about "maybe touring some of that '80s-period music, because it was very special." But Anderson says he and Rabin aren't necessarily thinking about resurrecting that version of Yes as a recording entity. "I wouldn't do it, like, Yes," Anderson explains. "I'd do it like me and Trevor aspiring to be the two of us making music and see what we come up with. The Yes anniversary tour kicks off July 12 at the Festival d'ete de Quebec in Quebec City.

May 1, 2008 Venerable Classical-Music Magazine Plans to Add Online Sales to Its Reviews By DANIEL J. WAKIN Gramophone — the leading classical music magazine in the world, 85 years old and based in London — plans to allow readers to buy CDs and downloads from its Web site. This means that it may profit from recordings on which it is passing critical judgment. The plans are part of a broad expansion of Gramophone’s online presence. In the first phase, expected by the end of the summer, it will make its entire archive, including some 100,000 recording reviews and articles, available free. By early next year the magazine’s editors and owner say, readers will be able to shop from the Web site. Gramophone will collect a commission on each sale, said Michael Heseltine, the chairman of its parent company, Haymarket Media Group. Haymarket, which owns about 100 magazines, has roughly $500 million in annual revenues. The Gramophone move joins a tossed salad of schemes for the sale of classical music recordings, with everything now up in the air. CD sales have plummeted over the last decade, and the scramble is on to figure out how to match the download sales of pop music and rock, whose buyers tend to be younger and more computer-friendly. Classical-music buyers may be experts dissatisfied with the haphazard way download services present performances or newcomers bewildered by the array of artists and interpretations. Few knowledgeable salespeople remain because most of their stores have closed. Complaints about download services or big online retailers are common, whether because the wealth of information associated with classical recordings is poorly presented or because of clicks that can be heard between the sections of long works. And a bewildering array of new sources of classical recordings have emerged. Opera houses and orchestras are offering downloads of their performances or creating their own CD labels. Even composers and performers have their own Web sites, with downloads available. The venerable Deutsche Grammophon label is offering downloads directly, including those of many out-of-print recordings. Gramophone is stepping into the fray with what it calls a vast amount of data to guide buyers, both new and old. Web visitors can read about a performance, listen to a sample, then buy the work. “We complete the food chain,” said James Jolly, Gramophone’s editor in chief. The major record companies — Gramophone’s advertisers — have shown keen interest in the project. “We’ve been in dialogue with them for a long time,” said Costa Pilavachi, the president of EMI Classics. “We see them as a partner.” “There are really very few places where a well-informed classical consumer can go to buy a classical recording and feel at home on the site,” Mr. Pilavachi said. Melanne Mueller, the senior vice president of Universal Music Classical, said that details had yet to be worked out on how it would sell music on Gramophone. “We welcome the development,” she said. Her division is the American marketing arm of Deutsche Grammophon, Decca and Philips. The plans raise ethical concerns about the propriety of such an arrangement. “It sounds like a classic conflict of interest,” said Victor S. Navasky, the former editor of The Nation who is now the director of the Delacorte Center for Magazine Journalism at Columbia University. “However there seem to be an infinite number of conflict of interests in cyberspace, and they are just beginning to be sorted out.” Samir Husni, a journalism professor at the University of Mississippi and an expert on magazines, said he saw no ethical problem. “You have Gramophone the magazine, and you have Gramophone the store,” he said. The greater problem lies in magazines that do not make the distinction clear, he said. Mr. Jolly and Lord Heseltine, a former British deputy prime minister, dismissed the notion that selling CDs would have any impact on the magazine’s editorial integrity. “You can’t maintain the reputation of a magazine like Gramophone by producing phony reviews or misguiding reviews,” Lord Heseltine said. “It would damage the product irreversibly. Our first and foremost task is to tell the truth to readers.” Mr. Jolly called Gramophone’s reviewers, who are freelancers, “very independent-minded people.” He said there was a “huge Chinese wall” between the magazine’s business and editorial sides, adding, “I can see the wall climbing higher.” James Inverne, Gramophone’s editor and the man directly responsible for its content, said that an outside company would handle the music sales. He said that the executives responsible for Gramophone’s e-commerce business had little contact with editorial officials. The magazine’s editorial independence has been strong enough, he added, that some record companies have pulled advertising because of negative reviews. Gramophone, a monthly, has a print circulation of about 40,000 copies worldwide, more than a third of them in the United States. About 87,000 people are registered on its Web site, which already offers access to reviews published since 1983, the dawn of the CD era. The magazine publishes about 180 reviews a month. The expanded site will have more than 100,000 pages, which will boost Gramophone’s Google ranking and attract more hits, so more money can be charged for advertising, Mr. Jolly said. “That’s key to our strategy,” he added.

This could be what was missing from Masada all these years. .

That was my next guess, but I didn't want to say anything. .

Bike Pink Floyd I've got a bike You can ride it if you like It's got a basket A bell that rings And things to make it look good I'd give it to you if I could But I borrowed it You're the kind of girl that fits in with my world I'll give you anything Everything if you want things I've got a cloak It's a bit of a joke There's a tear up the front It's red and black I've had it for months If you think it could look good Then I guess it should You're the kind of girl that fits in with my world I'll give you anything Everything if you want things I know a mouse And he hasn't got a house I don't know why I call him Gerald He's getting rather old But he's a good mouse You're the kind of girl that fits in with my world I'll give you anything Everything if you want things I've got a clan of gingerbread men Here a man There a man Lots of gingerbread men Take a couple if you wish They're on the dish You're the kind of girl that fits in with my world I'll give you anything Everything if you want things I know a room full of musical tunes Some rhyme Some ching Most of them are clockwork Let's go into the other room and make them work

Dr. Hofmann, date unknown, with a chemical model of LSD. April 30, 2008 Albert Hofmann, the Father of LSD, Dies at 102 By CRAIG S. SMITH, NYT PARIS — Albert Hofmann, the mystical Swiss chemist who gave the world LSD, the most powerful psychotropic substance known, died Tuesday at his hilltop home near Basel, Switzerland. He was 102. The cause was a heart attack, said Rick Doblin, founder and president of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, a California-based group that in 2005 republished Dr. Hofmann’s 1979 book “LSD: My Problem Child.” Dr. Hofmann first synthesized the compound lysergic acid diethylamide in 1938 but did not discover its psychopharmacological effects until five years later, when he accidentally ingested the substance that became known to the 1960s counterculture as acid. He then took LSD hundreds of times, but regarded it as a powerful and potentially dangerous psychotropic drug that demanded respect. More important to him than the pleasures of the psychedelic experience was the drug’s value as a revelatory aid for contemplating and understanding what he saw as humanity’s oneness with nature. That perception, of union, which came to Dr. Hofmann as almost a religious epiphany while still a child, directed much of his personal and professional life. Dr. Hofmann was born in Baden, a spa town in northern Switzerland, on Jan. 11, 1906, the eldest of four children. His father, who had no higher education, was a toolmaker in a local factory, and the family lived in a rented apartment. But Dr. Hofmann spent much of his childhood outdoors. He would wander the hills above the town and play around the ruins of a Hapsburg castle, the Stein. “It was a real paradise up there,” he said in an interview in 2006. “We had no money, but I had a wonderful childhood.” It was during one of his ambles that he had his epiphany. “It happened on a May morning — I have forgotten the year — but I can still point to the exact spot where it occurred, on a forest path on Martinsberg above Baden,” he wrote in “LSD: My Problem Child.” “As I strolled through the freshly greened woods filled with bird song and lit up by the morning sun, all at once everything appeared in an uncommonly clear light. “It shone with the most beautiful radiance, speaking to the heart, as though it wanted to encompass me in its majesty. I was filled with an indescribable sensation of joy, oneness and blissful security.” Though Dr. Hofmann’s father was a Roman Catholic and his mother a Protestant, Dr. Hofmann, from an early age, felt that organized religion missed the point. When he was 7 or 8, he recalled, he spoke to a friend about whether Jesus was divine. “I said that I didn’t believe, but that there must be a God because there is the world and someone made the world,” he said. “I had this very deep connection with nature.” Dr. Hofmann went on to study chemistry at Zurich University because, he said, he wanted to explore the natural world at the level where energy and elements combine to create life. He earned his Ph.D. there in 1929, when he was just 23. He then took a job with Sandoz Laboratories in Basel, attracted by a program there that sought to synthesize pharmacological compounds from medicinally important plants. It was during his work on the ergot fungus, which grows in rye kernels, that he stumbled on LSD, accidentally ingesting a trace of the compound one Friday afternoon in April 1943. Soon he experienced an altered state of consciousness similar to the one he had experienced as a child. On the following Monday, he deliberately swallowed a dose of LSD and rode his bicycle home as the effects of the drug overwhelmed him. That day, April 19, later became memorialized by LSD enthusiasts as “bicycle day.” Albert Hofmann in 2006. Dr. Hofmann’s work produced other important drugs, including methergine, used to treat postpartum hemorrhaging, the leading cause of death from childbirth. But it was LSD that shaped both his career and his spiritual quest. “Through my LSD experience and my new picture of reality, I became aware of the wonder of creation, the magnificence of nature and of the animal and plant kingdom,” Dr. Hofmann told the psychiatrist Stanislav Grof during an interview in 1984. “I became very sensitive to what will happen to all this and all of us.” Dr. Hofmann became an impassioned advocate for the environment and argued that LSD, besides being a valuable tool for psychiatry, could be used to awaken a deeper awareness of mankind’s place in nature and help curb society’s ultimately self-destructive degradation of the natural world. But he was also disturbed by the cavalier use of LSD as a drug for entertainment, arguing that it should be treated in the way that primitive societies treat psychoactive sacred plants, which are ingested with care and spiritual intent. After his discovery of LSD’s properties, Dr. Hofmann spent years researching sacred plants. With his friend R. Gordon Wasson, he participated in psychedelic rituals with Mazatec shamans in southern Mexico. He succeeded in synthesizing the active compounds in the Psilocybe mexicana mushroom, which he named psilocybin and psilocin. He also isolated the active compound in morning glory seeds, which the Mazatec also used as an intoxicant, and found that its chemical structure was close to that of LSD. During the psychedelic era, Dr. Hofmann struck up friendships with such outsize personalities as Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg and Aldous Huxley, who, nearing death in 1963, asked his wife for an injection of LSD to help him through the final painful throes of throat cancer. Yet despite his involvement with psychoactive compounds, Dr. Hofmann remained moored in his Swiss chemist identity. He stayed with Sandoz as head of the research department for natural medicines until his retirement in 1971. He wrote more than 100 scientific articles and was the author or co-author of a number of books He and his wife, Anita, who died recently, reared four children in Basel. A son died of alcoholism at 53. Survivors include several grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Though Dr. Hofmann called LSD “medicine for the soul,” by 2006 his hallucinogenic days were long behind him, he said in the interview that year. “I know LSD; I don’t need to take it anymore,” he said, adding. “Maybe when I die, like Aldous Huxley.” But he said LSD had not affected his understanding of death. In death, he said, “I go back to where I came from, to where I was before I was born, that’s all.”

April 30, 2008 Inflatable pig lost during Coachella music festival is found By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Filed at 10:44 a.m. ET INDIO, Calif. (AP) -- A giant helium-filled pig didn't drift off to hog heaven after it was released into the night sky during Roger Waters' performance at the Coachella music festival. It's been found -- in pieces. Two couples found tattered halves of the inflatable swine in their yards, a few miles from festival grounds in the Southern California desert. Concert organizers had offered a $10,000 reward for the pig's return. On Tuesday, pieces of the plastic carcass were examined. ''That's definitely our pig,'' producer Bill Fold said. Susan Stoltz found a plastic heap in her driveway Monday, but said she didn't know what it was until she read about the missing pig in the Desert Sun newspaper. ''My kids are going to think I'm so cool,'' she said. Another resident of the same neighborhood, Judy Rimmer, said she found a piece of the pig draped over a front-yard plant. The two couples will split the cash reward, Fold said. As tall as a two-story house and as wide as two school buses, the pig was led from lines held on the ground Sunday as Waters played a version of Pink Floyd's ''Pigs'' from the 1977 anti-capitalist album ''Animals.'' Then it just floated away. ''It wasn't really supposed to happen that way. I don't have the details,'' festival spokeswoman Marcee Rondan said. The pig displayed the words ''Don't be led to the slaughter'' and a cartoon of Uncle Sam holding two bloody cleavers. The other side read ''Fear builds walls'' and the underside read ''Obama'' with a checked ballot box for Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama.

I'm such a bummer....dude. .

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