7/4

Bah.

If you surf around a bit, you can see that the photo is credited Courtesy of National Archives & Records Administration. Here's another taken at the same event:

Yeah and Playboy Bunny too. .

Apparently the Black Page is unnecessarily complicated...even the easy teenage version. .

Holy crap! I knew EC was old but not that old! plenty of discussion here.

The music of Olivier Messiaen, at the organ in 1972, is the focus of a number of centennial concerts in New York. April 6, 2008 The Elusive Allure of Olivier Messiaen By ANTHONY TOMMASINI, NYTimes ORIGINALITY may be overrated in the arts. All creators emulate the masters and borrow from one another. Big deal! The composer and critic Virgil Thomson routinely debunked what he called the “game of influences,” which he considered “about as profitable a study as who caught cold from whom when they were standing in the same draft.” But the French modernist master Olivier Messiaen, who died in 1992 at 83, was truly an original. No other music sounds quite like his, with its mystical allure, ecstatic energy and elusive harmonic language, grounded yet ethereal. Rhythmically his pieces slip suddenly from timeless contemplation to riotous agitation then back again, sometimes by the measure. In the introduction to his 1985 book on Messiaen the critic Paul Griffiths calls him “the first great composer whose works exist entirely after, and to a large degree apart from, the great Western tradition.” There will be many chances to encounter Messiaen this year, the centennial of his birth in Avignon on Dec. 10, 2008, the day before Elliott Carter was born in New York. An early and ambitious event in the Messiaen commemoration in New York came in February, when David Robertson conducted the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra in a glittering, rhapsodic account of the 75-minute “Turangalila Symphony,” composed from 1946 to 1948. A large and noticeably young audience turned up at Carnegie Hall to hear this unorthodox and exhilarating 10-movement work: a meditation on joy and creation, on nature in both its pastoral and violent manifestations, and on exalted human love as a pathway to transcendent death. Also in February the Axiom Ensemble at the Juilliard School performed “Des Canyons aux Étoiles” (“From the Canyons to the Stars”), a kaleidoscopic 100-minute tone poem for 40 players. Messiaen was inspired to write the work by a visit to Bryce Canyon in Utah, where he hitchhiked with his second wife, the pianist Yvonne Loriod, stood in awe before rock formations and eagerly transcribed birdcalls (a lifelong passion for Messiaen, a practicing Roman Catholic to whom birds were truly “God’s musicians,” in Mr. Robertson’s words). In May, New York audiences will have two chances to hear a seminal chamber work, “Quartet for the End of Time,” which was first performed on Jan. 15, 1941, at a Nazi prison camp in Silesia where Messiaen, then a soldier in the French Army, was in captivity. This eight-movement quartet, by turns quizzically contemplative and bursting with defiant abandon, was scored for the only instruments available in the camp, all broken down: an upright piano, a violin, a clarinet and a cello with a missing string. Some 5,000 prisoners heard the performance. The pianist Mitsuko Uchida will play the piece as part of an “Uchida and Friends” program at Zankel Hall on May 17. And the original members of the adventurous contemporary-music ensemble Tashi (the pianist Peter Serkin, the violinist Ida Kavafian, the cellist Fred Sherry and the clarinetist Richard Stoltzman), reuniting after three decades, are touring with a program featuring “Quartet for the End of Time,” the work that first brought them together. They will perform a free concert at Town Hall on May 4. Any discussion of Messiaen’s distinctiveness would have to start with his sound world, specifically his harmonic language. In his youth he was drawn on his own to the piano and to the organ-music heritage of the Catholic Church. By 1919, when his father, an English teacher and translator of Shakespeare, got a teaching job in Paris, Messiaen had entered the city’s renowned conservatory at a remarkably early age. His studies included composition, piano, percussion and the art of improvisation at the organ. At 22 he was appointed organist at the Church of the Trinity in Paris, a position he held officially for 40 years, though he continued playing services there until his death. His music-history teacher was a scholar of the modes of ancient Greece and the medieval era (modes being earlier forms of scales that predated major and minor keys). Even while completing his education, Messiaen adopted a series of modes, contemporary riffs on the ancient ones, with repetitive patterns of half steps and whole steps throughout the scale. He did not actually invent these “modes of limited transposition,” as he called them, noting their employment by composers as diverse as Rimsky-Korsakov, Scriabin and Ravel. But his extensive and complex adaptation of the modes was new and lent his harmonic language its timeless and exotic character. To Messiaen certain modes had certain colors: not just aural colors but visual ones. Throughout his life he experienced powerful sensory correlations between sound and color. As Mr. Robertson explained in a talk before the performance of the “Turangalila Symphony,” when Messiaen saw a rainbow, he literally heard a celestial harmony. In speaking about this Messiaen could seem a little peculiar. Discussing the first transposition of his Mode 2 in a series of interviews with the critic Claude Samuel, Messiaen defined it as “blue-violet rocks speckled with little gray cubes, cobalt blue, deep Prussian blue, highlighted by a bit of violet-purple, gold red, ruby and stars of mauve, black and white.” “Blue-violet,” he added, “is dominant.” Naturally. Whatever the case, the results are what counts. And Messiaen’s musical language blithely juxtaposes piercing astringencies with lushly sonorous diatonic harmonies, and with Impressionistic chords in homage to his beloved Debussy that can make a Messiaen orchestra sound like a cosmic big band. His piano pieces are filled with thick cluster chords, crammed with too many notes, it would seem, to make the pitches audible. But remove a single pitch from one of those chords, and it loses its shimmer and sounds duller, less pungent, just not right. In the mid-1940s Messiaen was both rattled and fascinated by the Second Viennese School, the movement that advanced the 12-tone techniques pioneered by Schoenberg. Messiaen, then teaching at the Paris Conservatory, wanted to introduce his students to those theories. But the subject was controversial within the faculty. Messiaen wound up taking a group of students, the young Pierre Boulez among them, off campus. Like a band of renegades, teacher and students explored the techniques together. Though Messiaen never signed on to the system, his exploration profoundly affected his work, making him a more precise and daring composer. But the dimension of Messiaen’s music that may most set it apart derives from his spiritual life. His faith was innocent, not intellectual. As a child he loved the plays of Shakespeare, especially their “super-fairy-tale” aspects, he said. In the stories of the Catholic faith, as he told Mr. Samuel, he found the “attraction of the marvelous” he had coveted in Shakespeare, but “multiplied a hundredfold, a thousandfold.” For him the Christian stories were not theatrical fiction but true. Messiaen espoused a theology of glory, transcendence and eternity. Religious subjects permeate his works, though not the Passion and Crucifixion of Jesus. His embrace of the wondrousness of faith is reflected in the essence of his compositions. There is a notable lack of development in his music, a denial of “normal harmonic impetus,” as Mr. Griffiths puts it in his Messiaen book. Instead his pieces seem almost spatial, like a series of musical blocks with juxtaposed panels that variously induce feelings of ecstasy, agitation, contemplation or mystery. Messiaen’s music often bursts with charged rhythmic energy. A student of Indian music, he incorporated Eastern rhythmic modes into his language to produce irregular but breathless rhythms that can instill passages with an infectiously jerky swing. Take the dizzying “Dance of Frenzy, for the Seven Trumpets” from “Quartet for the End of Time,” in which for nearly six minutes the four instruments play in unison a twisting, circular thematic line that evokes gongs and trumpets announcing the apocalypse. Yet this inexorable music seems to hover in some higher rhythmic (and spiritual) realm, untethered to a regular pulse or meter. The summation of Messiaen’s creative life came with his only opera, “St. François d’Assise” (1975-83). Though he revered operas by Rameau, Wagner, Debussy and Mussorgsky, he came to believe that the genre was passé. When approached by the Paris Opera to write a work, he demurred. He finally agreed, vowing to write his own kind of opera. What he created was less like a “genuine opera” than a “musical spectacle,” in Messiaen’s words. Scored for an orchestra of 120 and a chorus of 150, “St. François” has more than four hours of music in eight self-contained tableaus, with scant dramatic continuity. Messiaen, who wrote the libretto, left out the pivotal story of the saint’s conversion, explaining that “sin is not interesting.” Instead we see scenes of St. Francis traveling with a fellow monk, teaching him of perfect joy, embracing a leper at the urging of an angel and, in the final tableau, serenely accepting death as he bids farewell to his beloved birds, while the blinding aura of divine illumination radiates throughout the ecstatic music. The opera is unorthodox, unwieldy and awesome. There have been only a few notable productions, including one directed by Peter Sellars for the Salzburg Festival in 1992 when Gerard Mortier was in charge. Mr. Mortier has announced his intention to mount a production after he takes over New York City Opera, perhaps in the Park Avenue Armory. I can’t wait. My only encounter with Messiaen came during his visit to the New England Conservatory in Boston in 1986. I will never forget the enthralling performance he and Ms. Loriod gave of “Visions de l’Amen,” an audacious, wildly joyful and technically formidable work for two pianos. Taking questions from the audience, Messiaen was visibly moved when a young man asked, “Does a listener have to have had a spiritual experience to appreciate your music?” “Not at all,” Messiaen answered. But, he added, “it would be the highest compliment to me as a composer if you had a spiritual experience because of hearing my music.”

We're not talking about Warren Cuccurullo.

Works for me.

I think it came out recently on CD. Did you check out the Edgard Varesé thread?

I'm trippin'.

April 5, 2008 Editorial Observer The Already Big Thing on the Internet: Spying on Users By ADAM COHEN, NYTimes In 1993, the dawn of the Internet age, the liberating anonymity of the online world was captured in a well-known New Yorker cartoon. One dog, sitting at a computer, tells another: “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” Fifteen years later, that anonymity is gone. It’s not paranoia: they really are spying on you. Technology companies have long used “cookies,” little bits of tracking software slipped onto your computer, and other means, to record the Web sites you visit, the ads you click on, even the words you enter in search engines — information that some hold onto forever. They’re not telling you they’re doing it, and they’re not asking permission. Internet service providers are now getting into the act. Because they control your connection, they can keep track of everything you do online, and there have been reports that I.S.P.’s may have started to sell the information they collect. The driving force behind this prying is commerce. The big growth area in online advertising right now is “behavioral targeting.” Web sites can charge a premium if they are able to tell the maker of an expensive sports car that its ads will appear on Web pages clicked on by upper-income, middle-aged men. The information, however, gets a lot more specific than age and gender — and more sensitive. Tech companies can keep track of when a particular Internet user looks up Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, visits adult Web sites, buys cancer drugs online or participates in anti-government discussion groups. Serving up ads based on behavioral targeting can itself be an invasion of privacy, especially when the information used is personal. (“Hmm ... I wonder why I always get those drug-rehab ads when I surf the Internet on Jane’s laptop?”) The bigger issue is the digital dossiers that tech companies can compile. Some companies have promised to keep data confidential, or to obscure it so it cannot be traced back to individuals. But it’s hard to know what a particular company’s policy is, and there are too many to keep track of. And privacy policies can be changed at any time. There is also no guarantee that the information will stay with the company that collected it. It can be sold to employers or insurance companies, which have financial motives for wanting to know if their workers and policyholders are alcoholics or have AIDS. It could also end up with the government, which needs only to serve a subpoena to get it (and these days that formality might be ignored). If George Orwell had lived in the Internet age, he could have painted a grim picture of how Web monitoring could be used to promote authoritarianism. There is no need for neighborhood informants and paper dossiers if the government can see citizens’ every Web site visit, e-mail and text message. The public has been slow to express outrage — not, as tech companies like to claim, because they don’t care about privacy, but simply because few people know all that is going on. That is changing. “A lot of people are creeped-out by this,” says Ari Schwartz, a vice president of the Center for Democracy and Technology. He says the government is under increasing pressure to act. The Federal Trade Commission has proposed self-regulatory guidelines for companies that do behavioral targeting. Anything that highlights the problem is good, but self-regulation is not enough. One idea starting to gain traction in Congress is a do-not-track list, similar to the federal do-not-call list, which would allow Internet users to opt out of being spied on. That would be a clear improvement over the status quo, but the operating principle should be “opt in” — companies should not be allowed to track Internet activities unless they get the user’s expressed consent. The founders wrote the Fourth Amendment — guaranteeing protection against illegal search and seizure — at a time when people were most concerned about protecting the privacy of their homes and bodies. The amendment, and more recent federal laws, have been extended to cover telephone communications. Now work has to be done to give Internet activities the same level of privacy protection.

for those who somehow missed it... Edgard Varese: The Idol of My Youth By Frank Zappa Article taken from Stereo Review, June 1971. pp 61-62.

party pooper. .

happy happy happy -> .

Well, we now know that he worked w/Woody Shaw in California, and apparently quite well, at some point before 1975. I don't think I've read this Woody profile since 1975, long before I would have known who Terry Bozzio was. So imagine my near-total shock when I was reading this yesterday & saw Terry Bozzio listed as a drummer with whom Woody Shaw had enjoyed playing. Yep. Still..I wonder what he'd sound like.

That maybe be the case, I don't think they can fit it all on 7 CDs. Which is OK by me, I don't really need a CD release of the orchestra piece. .

SCOTT THUNES. REQUIEM FOR A HEAVYWEIGHT? .

Now I want one... .

April 4, 2008 Klaus Dinger, Drummer of Influential German Beat, Dies at 61 By BEN SISARIO, NYTimes Klaus Dinger, the drummer for the 1970s German band Neu!, whose mechanically repetitive yet buoyant beats had a wide influence in underground rock, died on March 20. He was 61. The cause was heart failure, according to an announcement on Wednesday by his German record label, Grönland, which did not say where he died. Mr. Dinger formed Neu!, which means New!, with the guitarist Michael Rother in Düsseldorf in 1971, after both had played in an early incarnation of the group Kraftwerk. Over three albums, the two perfected a droning, hypnotic style made up of Mr. Dinger’s simple, perpetual-motion rhythms and Mr. Rother’s fluid guitar effects. Exemplified in songs like the 10-minute “Hallogallo,” Mr. Dinger’s beat was a steady pulse that seemed to extend rock’s most basic rhythmic patterns infinitely. The beat came to be known as Motorik, an allusion to the industrial style then prevalent among German groups. (The name Kraftwerk means power station.) Along with records by Kraftwerk, Can, Faust and a few other groups, the original Neu! albums — “Neu!” (1972), “Neu! 2” (1973) and “Neu! ’75” (1975) — are landmarks of German experimental rock, a genre that was quickly labeled Krautrock by journalists and fans, both affectionately and derisively. (The musicians preferred the term Kosmische Musik, or cosmic music.) Though the Neu! albums were long out of print before being reissued in 2001, they inspired countless artists, including David Bowie, Sonic Youth, Radiohead and Stereolab. The Neu! beat can also be heard in recent work by such groups as the Boredoms, from Japan. Brian Eno, the British producer who championed Neu! and later worked with Mr. Rother, once said, “There were three great beats in the ’70s: Fela Kuti’s Afrobeat, James Brown’s funk and Klaus Dinger’s Neu! beat.” In his student days in the 1960s, Mr. Dinger played in rock bands that he has described as influenced by the Beatles and the Kinks. He studied architecture but dropped out after three years to pursue music. Mr. Dinger and Mr. Rother parted ways after the third Neu! album, and Mr. Dinger formed La Düsseldorf and later La! Neu? He reunited with Mr. Rother briefly in the mid-1980s and recorded an album, “Neu! 4,” that was released in 1995. In a 1998 interview Mr. Dinger complained that he never called his beat Motorik. “That sounds more like a machine, and it was very much a human beat,” he said. “It is essentially about life, how you have to keep moving, get on and stay in motion.”

The Arista material should fit on 8 discs, depending on extra material. There are two versions of 23G that were recorded but rejected for the Berlin/Montreux Concerts. As for the "Freedom" material, the Complete Braxton was a 2 LP set and Silence was 1 LP. Time Zones with Teitelbaum was 1 LP with Braxton on both sides. Silence and Time Zones were reissued on 1 disc by Black Lion. The word is seven. 7 Seven is the word.

lol Allen what a great collection of quips. Here's a favorite: "He doesn't seem to pay any attention to his guitar tone." - Portland Phoenix They're all a hoot.

I first heard him playing Zappa's The Black Page and then in a bunch of other places during the years...I dunno...he's just a fusion guy. I used to be into that kind of stuff. I wonder what he'd sound like with a little set...cymbal, snare, hi-hat, bass and one mounted tom - playing straight ahead.

For the electric guitar, the amp is such a big part of the tone! * Own one of these, eh?

No Hammond B-3.

Same tubes as a Fender Pro Jr, with a 12" speaker instead of a 10" and cheaper. It also has 4, 8 and 16 ohm speaker outs for more flexability (diff speakers) in the external cab dept. Blackheart Engineering web site. I've seen the name around, but don't know too much about them...new name.