7/4

Clearly I have to re-think my footware options and check out what's on the market. .

I never bothered for fear of things not working out. .

Holdsworth used to use a synth controller called a SynthAxe. Apparently he wrote a tune (I forgot which) where the guitar was in some sort of special tuning, maybe it was tuned in fifths. And one tour, he was playing this on a green double neck Steinberger with one neck in the special tuning. Anyways...enough about Steinbergers for now...

fake 'berger:

one more:

posted for musical content... March 23, 2008 On Day of Resurrection, a Church Unveils Its New Organ By JAMES BARRON, NYTimes Jack M. Bethards stood on a catwalk in a room the size of a walk-in closet, a little room that his crew had built in the front of a little church on the Upper West Side. In this space, a few feet from the altar, are the inner workings of a brand new $600,000 pipe organ that his crew had also built. He wanted to tune it. But on a March morning that was more lion than lamb, the church was too cold. The thermostat had been left at 65 during the night. “I’ve asked for it to come up to 68,” Mr. Bethards said. “We’d like it to be a little closer to 70.” It was the beginning of another 12-hour day of testing and tuning at Christ and St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church, on West 69th Street between Broadway and Columbus Avenue — another day in the race to get ready for Palm Sunday and Easter, two of the most important days in the Christian calendar. The church wanted the organ to be heard on Palm Sunday, and it was. Then it fell silent for Holy Week, as dictated by church tradition. Its full-fledged debut, on Easter Sunday, was to begin with Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in C Major, B.W.V. 547. That would be followed by the choir’s singing the hymn “Jesus Christ Is Risen Today” as it marched down the aisle. Christ and St. Stephen’s wanted more than an instrument for Sunday morning services. It wanted to take advantage of its location, a few blocks from Lincoln Center, to attract well-known organists for recitals of music beyond the liturgical repertory. Christ and St. Stephen’s already has a concert series and an artist in residence, Paul Jacobs, the chairman of the organ department at the Juilliard School. He was closely involved in the planning for the new organ, and is scheduled to play a dedication recital on May 17. “This is a new treasure for New York,” Mr. Jacobs said. Choosing a new organ is a milestone for any congregation, a commitment to the future and a statement about what the church wants to be: traditional or contemporary, formal or less so. Next to a sanctuary itself, an organ is one of the most permanent anchors that a church can have in the everyday world. It is also one of its biggest investments and, if the congregation is unhappy with the way the organist is playing it, one of its biggest irritants. Since the 1960s, as congregations have dwindled and a changing culture has moved away from hymns and traditional compositions, some churches have experimented with folk guitars. Some megachurches have abandoned organs for rock bands. Not Christ and St. Stephen’s. Its old organ dated to 1876 — “a Cadillac in its time,” said the Rev. L. Kathleen Liles, the rector. But it had been renovated and reworked over the years until it was, Mr. Jacobs said, “a hodgepodge.” But the church put off deciding what to do until the ceiling in the sanctuary collapsed in 2004. Plaster dust filled the old organ’s pipes, dooming the instrument. “Our conservators told us it wasn’t worth fixing,” Ms. Liles said. So the church added a new organ to its to-do list. That doubled the budget for the renovations and repairs. “It was an exceedingly ambitious project for a parish our size, 285 members,” she said. “But we’re a musical congregation, this is a music-loving neighborhood, most of our members live in the neighborhood and walk to the church, and we see music not as an ornament to our worship but as an integral part of it.” The neighborhood pitched in. The West 69th Street Block Association approved a $3,000 grant for the church, Ms. Liles said, and several bequests helped bring the church to within $200,000 of the $1.2 million total. The church decided to go the traditional route, buying another pipe organ and not a “virtual” instrument like the computerized electronic one with digital audio that Trinity Church on Wall Street installed after its pipe organ was damaged in the dust cloud from ground zero on 9/11. Christ and St. Stephen’s hired one of the big names in the business, Schoenstein & Company. Christ and St. Stephen’s had already been considering Schoenstein, a choice that was met with approval by the church’s organist and choirmaster, Nigel Potts, and Mr. Jacobs. Both of them studied at Yale under the organist Thomas Murray, who has championed Schoenstein organs for their distinctive tonal colorations. So, since mid-February, the sanctuary has served as a staging area, carpentry shop and final assembly point as Mr. Bethards and his crew have put the instrument together, piece by piece. They made the components in their factory near San Francisco and shipped them to New York — 1,042 pipes, the wind chests that drive air into the pipes, the console with three 61-note manuals and a master switch modeled after the one found in a Rolls-Royce. Except on Sundays, when the tools were packed up and the church held services as scheduled, Mr. Bethards and his installers put in long days in the sanctuary. They used the pews as workbenches. They scurried down the aisles carrying ladders, drills, meters to measure electrical power or strange-looking tools for poking and probing organ pipes — metal pipes with tops that look like exhaust vents, and wooden pipes that end in little chimneys. This organ is about one-eighth the size of the largest one Schoenstein has ever built, for the Mormon church’s conference center at Temple Square in Salt Lake City. That one has 7,708 pipes. “But in many ways, small organs are more challenging to build than big organs,” said Louis E. Patterson, a member of Schoenstein’s installation crew. “Each stop has to serve two, three, four different purposes, so the sound is more critical than on large organs where if you don’t like one flute stop, you can choose another one.” There was also the problem of shoehorning the organ into Christ and St. Stephen’s. The pipes could not be hidden in the back of the church because there is no loft. The parish set aside space at the front of the church — the walk-in closet. But the ceiling is only about 15 feet high. The longest pipes, the 16-footers that are a staple of any pipe organ, had to be shortened. Schoenstein’s solution was a pipe-within-a-pipe design that involved inserting a small tube into the top of each pipe. That, Mr. Patterson said, would “fool the pipe into thinking it’s longer than it is, and generate the right amount of sound.” The console looked different from the 60 organs Schoenstein had built since Mr. Bethards took over the company. This was the first with a circular, Rolls-Royce-style master ignition switch. As a boy, Mr. Bethards had idolized Rolls-Royces, especially the main switch, a round, black dial on the dashboard with a brass lever that turned on the engine in the days before Rollses had keys. On later models, a second brass lever also controlled the headlights. “I thought it was the most beautiful piece of industrial machinery, and we needed the same thing,” he said. So right there on the organ console, above the top manual, is a round black dial on the organ console with two brass levers. One is a starter: It turns on the blower in the walk-in closet to generate the wind that goes to the pipes. The other lever controls the lights on the console. The new organ also has a clock, an old-fashioned analog clock that is silent. “An organ clock can’t click,” Mr. Bethards said. “If it clicks, you’ll play everything at the tempo of a Sousa march.” But the clock was counting down the hours until Easter, and Mr. Bethards wanted to do the tuning and voicing, a critical final step in getting the organ ready. This involves directing the flow of the wind across the mouth of each pipe — moving the alignment of the pipes ever so slightly and making other adjustments. “It’s not terribly critical what the temperature is, as long as it’s the same when the organ is played,” Mr. Bethards said. “Temperature is important because people can begin to notice little inconsistencies in tuning when you’re two degrees off.” Mr. Bethards could tell that it was still too cold. According to the thermometer on the wall above the pipes, the temperature was still 66 degrees. “We’ll do this after lunch,” he said.

pictures are fine by me. edc was mumbling something about dried goods, whatever that is. .

So... ....did you bring us anything?

edc sounds restless, irritable and yes, discontent today. .

I ain't sayin'.

you don't say. . he didn't say.

you don't say. .

March 20, 2008 With Minimal Movement, a Musical Trek Through Time By ALLAN KOZINN The inventive new-music ensemble Counter)induction called its Tuesday-night program at Merkin Concert Hall “Fast Forward: Composers at the Edge.” But although the “on the edge” part was indisputable, the players might as accurately have called their program “Rewind.” The opening and closing works, both by Mauricio Kagel, were relics of the late 1960s avant-garde and haven’t worn terribly well. A Gyorgy Kurtag work paid tribute to Schumann, and a piece by Douglas Boyce was built around the 15th-century song “L’Homme Armé,” refracted through modern dissonance. Anthony Coleman’s “Flat Narrative” (2008) seemed not to be rooted in any time at all. A meditation on an element of literary technique, “Flat Narrative” turns the ensemble — piano, violin, viola, cello and bass clarinet — into a small symposium. At first the bass clarinet holds forth in conversational rhythms and motifs. The other instruments provide a counterpoint of responses, comments and arguments, sometimes all at once, but often in succession, with one instrument’s lines mirroring and expanding on its predecessors. The unfolding of the dialogue in the work’s first five minutes was promising, but Mr. Coleman eventually lost the thread, and the discussion descended into a stream of oddly clunky figures. The ensemble seemed to lose interest as well: what had been a fairly tight performance at first splintered into fuzzy, imprecise attacks and passionless playing. Mr. Boyce’s Quintet “L’Homme Armé” (2003), with its sharp-edged harmonies and zesty rhythms, fared considerably better, as did the succession of alternately shimmering and meditative fantasies that make up Mr. Kurtag’s “Hommage à R. Sch.” (1990). In these the playing, rooted by Blair McMillen’s pianism, was focused and lively. Mr. Kagel’s “Atem” (1970) has a theatrical impulse. Benjamin Fingland, the clarinetist, sat beneath a standing lamp at center stage, producing a nightmarish range of sounds on instruments of different sizes and configurations. A second musician sat at a table (also with a lamp) and cleaned a flute, but never played. For “Der Schall” (1968), a more expansive Kagel score, Counter)-induction surrendered the stage to a quintet conducted by Mr. Coleman. Each player has a large arsenal of instruments and noisemakers, and during the 45-minute work timbres and textures shift constantly. The result is earnest, eerie and sometimes zany, but that’s all there is. Any sense of musical movement is illusory, and summoning the illusion isn’t easy.

March 23, 2008 A Hybridist Jamming With the World By NATE CHINEN, NYTimes Among the international artists merging jazz and their native cultures is the Beninese guitarist Lionel Loueke. LIONEL LOUEKE, a guitarist from the West African country of Benin, was a spellbinding presence at Joe's Pub a couple of months ago as he started into the title track of "Karibu," his exceptional major-label debut. His long fingers flickered across the strings, eliciting not just a syncopated groove but also a shifting undergrowth of chords. He was just as busy vocally, clicking his tongue in percussive counterpoint, singing phrases in a floating cadence. It all felt rooted in African folk traditions but also cosmopolitan, progressive, harmonically fluid. Mr. Loueke, 34, has quickly earned a reputation in jazz circles as a startlingly original voice, the kind of player who gets others talking. He made a splash five years ago as a sideman with the trumpeter Terence Blanchard, and now he tours and records with the pianist Herbie Hancock. When Blue Note signed him last year, it confirmed what many already knew: He's one of the most striking jazz artists to emerge in some time. "Among the young musicians I've heard recently, he is the one that stands out for me," Mr. Hancock said. Mr. Hancock appears on "Karibu," which is out on Tuesday, along with another jazz legend, the saxophonist and composer Wayne Shorter. Over the last decade or so there has been a proliferation of international artists dealing seriously with jazz without tuning out their native cultures. Consider Mr. Loueke's band mates, who performed with him at Joe's Pub: the bassist Massimo Biolcati grew up in Sweden and Italy, and the drummer Ferenc Nemeth is from Hungary. A short list of others would include the Cuban drummers Dafnis Prieto and Francisco Mela, the Puerto Rican saxophonists David Sánchez and Miguel Zenón, and the Israeli clarinetist and saxophonist Anat Cohen. What's striking about these musicians is the elasticity of their approaches. They have shown that jazz can assume a range of dialects without losing its essence. "There's a line of thought that is growing," said Danilo Pérez, a Panamanian pianist and composer whose 2000 album, "Motherland," can rightly be considered a touchstone for the current generation of jazz hybridists. "People are coming to jazz with open ears and a perspective from their own place." Those variegated perspectives have already had an impact on the sound of jazz. To be a capable young jazz musician today is to be comfortable with virtually any groove, however complex or asymmetrical, and conversant in folk and pop dialects from several continents. Remarkably, for a genre so frequently described as America's indigenous art form, jazz is now unmistakably a global proposition, in terms of aesthetics as well as audience. Jazz has always been a polyglot music, informed not only by the folkloric music of Africa and the Caribbean but also by the pluralism of places where such traditions commingle. (Havana had a formative influence on the music, along with New Orleans, Chicago and New York.) Latin jazz essentially proposes its own rich history, running parallel to the mainstream jazz lineage, with which it often intersects. Mr. Loueke engages with the jazz tradition itself, in his own fashion. "Jazz is a language," he said at a cafe near Union Square a couple of months ago, after his most recent trip to Benin, where he goes once a year to visit family. "I have my accent, I have my way to choose different words. But most important for me is to understand that language." Many of his peers have a similar mind-set. "The people who have been most successful in these cross-cultural combinations are as rooted in the jazz tradition as they are in their own traditions," said Mr. Zenón, whose fourth album, "Awake," is due out on Marsalis Music next week. "There's all this stuff that's already there, that you don't have to think about. Then you're adding all the stuff that you've learned." That was certainly the case for Mr. Loueke, who now lives in North Bergen, N.J., with his wife, Benedicta, and their two small children. He grew up in an intellectual middle-class household — his father was a mathematics professor, his mother a grade-school teacher — and he played in traditional Beninese percussion groups from an early age. He also absorbed both Afro-pop, owing to the influence of a guitar-playing older brother, and sambas, owing to the vestigial Portuguese-Brazilian presence in his mother's coastal village. (Benin, now home to one of Africa's more stable democracies, figured prominently in the Atlantic slave trade.) He didn't pick up the guitar until he was 17. "Benin has no native guitar style," he said. "We have some distinct rhythms, and the traditional singing is unique. But the guitar, it all comes from Nigeria, Mali, Congo, Zaire." As an aspiring guitarist, he was voracious in his tastes: "I really checked out music from the whole continent." After hearing a George Benson CD, he developed a similar curiosity about jazz. It didn't take him long to draw a parallel between jazz soloing and the improvised vocalization of West African griots. He also heard in jazz an elusive groove that animates African music: "There are things you can't write on the paper, how it feels." So the nuance of swing is no less subtle than, say, the lilt of Malian kora music. And just as impossible to notate. In 1990 Mr. Loueke left Benin to study music in Ivory Coast, but jazz was not a part of his training there. That really began a few years later, when he moved to Paris to attend an American-affiliated conservatory. There he first heard albums by contemporary guitarists like Pat Metheny and Bill Frisell, studying them closely. And after graduating, he received a scholarship to the Berklee College of Music in Boston, where his teachers soon began telling him he was unique. There is no way to assess the globalization of jazz without acknowledging the influence of an institution like Berklee, which directs resources toward recruiting and scholarships abroad. "Domestic Caucasian students are a distinct minority at Berklee," Roger Brown, the school's president, said. "Our students can't leave here without having been exposed to what an Argentine musician or a Norwegian musician or a Malaysian musician brings to the equation." (When Mr. Pérez, who is on the faculty at Berklee and the New England Conservatory, recorded his composition "Panama Suite" recently with a group of students from both schools, he counted musicians from 11 countries among them.) Mr. Loueke met Mr. Biolcati and Mr. Nemeth at Berklee, and they struck an immediate rapport, partly because all three were engrossed in African music. They formed an African-infected collective trio called Gilfema, and in 2001 they separately auditioned for the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz Performance, a postgraduate program then based in Los Angeles that selects a handful of students every other year. All of them were accepted. The admission panel included Mr. Blanchard (the program's artistic director), Mr. Hancock (the institute's chairman) and Mr. Shorter. "My first impression was, I've never heard anybody play the guitar like that," Mr. Hancock recalled. Mr. Blanchard was just as impressed; within a year, he brought Mr. Loueke into his band. The jazz world was then in the process of becoming especially receptive to cross-pollination, thanks partly to a surge of interest among artists born and raised in the United States. Some of these, like the pianists Myra Melford and Jason Lindner, have pushed beyond eclecticism toward some kind of authority. Others, like the alto saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa and the pianist Vijay Iyer, both of Indian descent, and the trumpeter Amir ElSaffar, who is Iraqi-American, have used jazz as a means of exploring their heritage. Audiences and consumers, meanwhile, were growing steadily more accustomed to global influences. And grant-bestowing organizations were rewarding work with a multicultural bent. Against this backdrop the new crop of international artists has received perhaps an unprecedented degree of support. Ms. Cohen, the Israeli clarinetist, reflected recently that the jazz musicians of a generation ago faced more rigid expectations: "You had to cut it. And all the other people making music that is more today's norm, they were really outsiders." Ms. Cohen, whose profile in New York includes prewar swing as well as Brazilian choro and her own material, added that in Israel she played mostly Dixieland and big band jazz; her world-music pursuits really began after she arrived at Berklee. Mr. Loueke's last album — "Virgin Forest," released on ObliqSound in 2006 — was a whirlwind tour through his world, featuring the singer Gretchen Parlato (another Monk Institute peer) and a percussion ensemble recorded in Benin. "Karibu" stakes a stronger claim as a jazz record (as opposed to a "world-jazz" record), with its abstraction of the John Coltrane ballad "Naima" and a reinvention of Hoagy Carmichael's "Skylark." Both of those tracks reflect Mr. Loueke's cultural vantage, notably with respect to rhythm. But any jazz fan with a modern inclination will recognize the searching spirit behind the music. That impulse has been jazz's perpetual challenge and great constant, from the very beginning. In this sense the greater pull of artists like Mr. Loueke can be understood in the jazz realm not only as transformative but also as true to the tradition. Not everyone will see it this way — jazz has an avid and well-informed conservative constituency — but Mr. Hancock does. "His scope is so broad," he said of Mr. Loueke. "He draws on his African heritage. He's comfortable in the area of electronics, with a more acoustic style of playing, with a Spanish style, a Brazilian style. But he brings new things to the table." He added: "If what Lionel is showing is a reflection of a growing trend of musicians to be open and influenced by a broader palette of cultures, it's a very healthy one, and one that will continue to keep jazz alive into the future."

My late '80s guitar hero Allan Holdsworth played one.

.

I think he's OK, I have no problems with him...maybe that's why I only have one album by him and I really only got it because of the band anyhoo.

better than caffeine, I tell ya. .

On an early Saturday morning spin? I thought it was interesting enough to post...I think I even own a copy of Wish.

March 22, 2008 Music Review No Longer a Phenom but Unquestionably a Force By NATE CHINEN, NYTimes Fifteen years ago the saxophonist Joshua Redman released “Wish,” his second album on the Warner Brothers label, solidifying his stature as one of the brightest young stars in mainstream jazz. A number of things have changed since — Warner no longer has a jazz department, and it’s harder to say just what “mainstream jazz” entails — but not the basic facts of his prominence or his talent. As he closes in on 40, Mr. Redman resembles something like a frank, assiduous fulfillment of the promise held out by his younger self. Mr. Redman has been working at the Village Vanguard this week with a powerfully alert bassist, Reuben Rogers, and a sharp, supple drummer, Brian Blade. At one point in the first of two sold-out sets on Thursday night, they dusted off an original from “Wish,” the lightly floating waltz “Soul Dance.” Mr. Redman played the song’s melody on soprano saxophone instead of tenor, and then annotated its form with a series of quick arabesques. He sounded like someone with his eyes trained on the horizon. That’s the same vantage he suggests throughout “Back East” (Nonesuch), his most recent album, which was among the best jazz releases of 2007. At its core it’s a trio record, with a few different rhythm sections. (Mr. Blade and Mr. Rogers both appear on it, but not together.) And it nudges Mr. Redman into a position of stark exposure, as the latest tenor player to lead a trio after the example set by Sonny Rollins just over 50 years ago. On Thursday Mr. Redman’s flexible rapport with the trio undergirded several more recent compositions. “Reuben’s Rounds,” explicitly a showcase for Mr. Rogers, also involved some quicksilver tenor work. “Identity Thief” began with a rubato line, assigned in octaves to bass and tenor saxophone, before swerving into a groove. And “Two Track Mind” employed dartlike syncopations of the sort that flattered the whole band. Mr. Redman’s silvery improvisational style can give the impression of skimming the surface rather than digging in: all those fluid eighth-note streaks and rangy altissimo runs can feel too facile after a while, regardless of the effort behind them. So it was a treat to hear him grappling, at the start of the set, with “The Surrey With the Fringe on Top” and “East of the Sun (and West of the Moon),” the same two tracks that open “Back East.” “Surrey,” long associated with Mr. Rollins, frothed up to a fever pitch: at one point Mr. Blade sent a stick sailing into the audience. But on “East of the Sun,” Mr. Redman overrode a frisky 7/8 groove with touches of old-fashioned tenor gallantry. It made for a nice contrast, as well as a smart acknowledgment of his stylistic inheritance.

I always thought it was some sort of weather balloon, but never really inspected it that closely. .

All I ever had was a 12" of the Cross Eyed Marry single. The guitar playing in that band wasn't crazy enough for me... .

Depends on your perspective, I guess. I think Berigan was being ironic. No kidding.

Depends on your perspective, I guess.