7/4

You play better that way? I used to practice that way, but never perform while under the influence...maybe a party or an open jam.

I don't pay too much attention to spam. Not even curious to find out what Enormous male instrument has much more advantages. is all about. I already know anyway.

http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/showb...ticle707093.ece Zep ace no fan of new music VETERAN LED ZEPPELIN rocker ROBERT PLANT doesn’t have a Whole Lotta Love for all this new music nonsense. And the grumpy singer made his feelings well known in a bar in Camden, North London, last week. Wrinkly Robert showed his age with the rant at two of the world’s biggest bands as they were played over the stereo at Fifty Five Bar. He rubbished RADIOHEAD and the RED HOT CHILI PEPPERS — and then demanded to hear weirdo rocker CAPTAIN BEEFHEART instead. A source said: “He was drinking with a woman and didn’t like the choice of tunes playing. “Radiohead was on and he started complaining. He said, ‘What’s this rhyming c**p?’ “The staff were obviously keen to please him so they changed the music. They put on the Red Hot Chili Peppers, who they thought might be more up his street. But he didn’t like their stuff either and said it was like a ‘nursery rhyme.’ “He then said he wanted to listen to Captain Beefheart.” Led Zep’s brilliant reunion at London O2 Arena last year won them a new generation of fans. I was gutted when I had to miss it to watch the SPICE GIRLS launch their tour in America. But it seems Robert doesn’t have much time for modern-day musical heroes. Okay, so he might not like po-faced Radiohead and I don’t think they and Led Zep have much in common. The 1970s rockers travelled the world in their fuel-guzzling jet — while THOM YORKE’s lot would probably prefer transport fuelled by recycled teabags. But comparing Chili tracks to nursery rhymes? Has old Percy finally lost the plot? You’re unlikely to hear Beefheart — AKA DON VAN VLIET — in your average bar. He wrote strange songs with odd timings and surreal lyrics. His best-known album was 1969’s Trout Mask Replica, considered a masterpiece by fans. He recorded with his Magic Band and also collaborated with fellow oddball FRANK ZAPPA. But if Radiohead and ANTHONY KIEDIS and the Chilis, are c**p, I would hate to hear what Robert has to say about most of the rest of the current chart. He obviously judges everyone by his own band’s high standards. My source added: “Radiohead and the Chilis are two of the biggest and best groups in the world. But it seems they don’t compare to Beefheart in Plant’s mind.”

20ºF, going down to 11ºF tonight in NJ.

January 20, 2008 'Daydream Believer' Songwriter Dies By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Filed at 5:33 a.m. ET SAN DIEGO (AP) -- John Stewart, who wrote the Monkees' hit ''Daydream Believer'' and became a well-known figure in the 1960s folk music revival as a member of The Kingston Trio, has died, according to the band's Web site. He was 68. Stewart suffered a massive stroke or brain aneurysm and died early Saturday at a San Diego hospital, the band announced on its official Web site. ''The world has lost one of its best men, but a man who lived well and made many people happy with his love, his wit and his music,'' the announcement said. Stewart joined The Kingston Trio in 1961, three years after the band released its version of an old folk song, ''Tom Dooley,'' that went on to become a hit. Stewart replaced the band's founder Dave Guard, who had left to pursue a new musical direction. Stewart spent six years leading the group, during which time the band recorded 13 albums, according to its Web site. After the trio disbanded in 1967, Stewart went on to an acclaimed solo career that included recording more than 40 albums. Stewart's wife Buffy and children were at his side when he died, the Web site said. Plans had not been announced for memorial services.

Oh my, this is sad. RIP.

January 20, 2008 Settling Old Scores by Beethoven By MICHAEL WHITE, NYTimes MANCHESTER, England FEW would ever think to count the notes in Beethoven’s 30-odd piano sonatas. And were you to throw the arithmetic at even a seasoned pianist like Daniel Barenboim, who has been playing Beethoven sonata cycles for nearly half a century and begins another at the Royal Festival Hall in London on Jan. 28, you would probably get a blank response. Like most musicians Mr. Barenboim would rather discuss the impact of these magisterial works on the listener, their status in the history of Western art and the light they shed on one of Western art’s greatest minds. “There is hardly another output from any composer in any form,” he said recently, “that gives such a clear picture of a composer’s development and transformation.” But Prof. Barry Cooper, the chairman of the music faculty at Manchester University, ranks among the world’s leading authorities on Beethoven and has lived with the piano sonatas more intimately, perhaps, than anyone since Beethoven himself. So when he gives the note count as “half a million, roughly,” you can believe him. And even if he hasn’t kept a precise running total of the notes, he has certainly pondered every last one, long and hard, together with every slur, bar line, accent, dot and dash that ever found its way into the scores. His pondering began 12 years ago. And what he has to show for it is the encyclopedic critical edition of the sonatas just published by the Associated Board in London to replace the revered one Donald Francis Tovey made for the same publisher in 1931. In scholarly circles such things resemble assaults on Everest: not without precedent but still momentous, especially if you find a new route up. The crucial difference is that the objective is truth, not novelty. “The whole point of a new edition,” Professor Cooper said in his small, cluttered office on the university’s Victoria Park campus, not far from where Rutherford split the atom, “is to understand the composer’s original intentions, which get corrupted over time, not least by other editors in their attempts to understand. “When a text is corrupted, it places a barrier between the composer and listener that shouldn’t be there. You’re not hearing a Beethoven sonata but a Beethoven sonata adapted by someone else. So the ideal is to get back to what the Germans call an urtext, an authoritative statement of what the composer wanted us to hear. And to get that you have to track down and interpret as much as you can in the way of original sources.” The problem with establishing a Beethoven urtext is that the original sources are so many, varied and conflicting. Beethoven would usually begin by sketching out a sonata, either in a book or on loose pages that tended to separate, and write so close to illegibly that only a practiced eye could make sense of it. “I served a long apprenticeship deciphering Beethoven sketches,” Professor Cooper said. An autograph manuscript in Beethoven’s hand would be followed by a fair copy made by an assistant to send to the publisher. The publisher would produce a first impression (a trial run of, say, 100 copies), then a second impression of many more. After that — the world of 18th- and early-19th-century publishing being cowboy country — it was not uncommon for rival publishers to issue their own editions, sometimes at Beethoven’s request. In other words, he double-sold, even triple-sold, his work. At every stage in this chain came opportunities to change the text, either by accident or by design. But the difference between an error and a correction or improvement is not always clear, so you can end up with five or more variants of the same text with no conclusive proof of which one represents finality. To increase the confusion, some of this source material survives intact, some does not, and time and history have caused it to be scattered across the world. Many of Beethoven’s most important manuscripts have been collected in Bonn (his birthplace), Berlin or Vienna. But it is a continuing process. (The Beethovenhaus in Bonn is raising funds to buy the “Diabelli” Variations autograph from an undisclosed private source.) And there is still plenty of material elsewhere, including sonata sketches in London; the complete Opus 109 Sonata autograph in Washington; and a whole consignment of documents sent from Berlin to Poland for safekeeping during World War II, lost until they turned up recently in Krakow, where they remain. The detective work was aided in 1989 by a collated facsimile publication of every known first printed edition. But the facsimiles are themselves fallible (“Details have disappeared in the process of reproduction,” Professor Cooper said), a further reason for his huge undertaking of the last dozen years. “It’s not that others haven’t re-examined these sources,” he said. “There was a new Viennese edition of the sonatas issued by Schott around 1999-2001. It’s just that the examination hasn’t been carried out as well as it could, so there was still work to do.” Professor Cooper’s work over all these years has been microscopic. It involves minutiae. And for the most part it doesn’t affect the notes themselves, merely the way they are to be played. But then in scholarship (and in performance at the highest level) there is no “merely.” Everything counts. And although Professor Cooper acknowledges that “you’d need to know the sonatas quite well to hear the difference a new edition makes,” he insisted that pianists would find new things and listeners will detect them. “The notation of music has changed since 1800, and we have to stop and think about what Beethoven means when he writes a slur, a grace note, a staccato,” he said. “A lot of this is already in the academic books, but it hasn’t necessarily followed through to performance, partly because most pianists are not period specialists, and they’ve developed their own ways of playing core repertory like this over many years, but also because you don’t find the information in the printed music itself.” Professor Cooper’s new edition comes with copious notes (and inserted CDs) expounding on the state of knowledge about all these things, including double bar lines, which are one of his special interests. “Everyone,” he said, “knows what a double bar is” — the two perpendicular lines that conclude a section of the score — “but there’s no literature on double bars, nothing to tell you what they signify to the player. And though it’s a marking you can’t actually play, it does sound in performance because when pianists see it, they tend instinctively to slow up. So it’s significant. “But Beethoven’s double bars don’t look like those of other composers of his time, and the ones in his manuscripts don’t match those in later printed editions. So there’s something to be investigated here. And I’ve done some investigation that I think will have real, practical consequences for how this music is played and received.” Of more obvious consequence for the lay listener will be Professor Cooper’s views on speed. In only one sonata, the “Hammerklavier,” does Beethoven supply metronome marks, and most players find them too fast. When Tovey edited the sonata, he dismissed the first-movement marking altogether as impossible. “We appreciate now that Beethoven’s speeds were surprisingly fast,” Professor Cooper said. “And it’s significant that when Beethoven’s pupil Carl Czerny wrote about the speed marking in the ‘Hammerklavier,’ he didn’t think it was impossible at all. He just said, ‘Work at it.’ Now I don’t think Czerny was always right, but I’ve taken the view in my edition that he was often a good guide.” Professor Cooper’s edition does throw one blindingly obvious change at the music world. There are no longer 32 Beethoven piano sonatas, as books and performers will tell you, but 35. Not that Professor Cooper has discovered three more. Rather, he has reconsidered and admitted to the canon three early sonatas written when Beethoven was 12, usually set aside as juvenilia. “I can find no reason why they shouldn’t be counted,” he said, “and indeed they were in the first complete edition of the sonatas, published just after Beethoven’s death by his friend Haslinger, who presumably knew what Beethoven wanted. They are fully fledged, three-movement works, and if they lack something in quality, you could say the same of some of the Opus 49 Sonatas, and you surely wouldn’t exclude those from the canon. “A complete edition has to be complete, and if you ignore early works, you don’t show the longer trajectory of the composer’s development. There are ideas in the second one that resurface much later in the ‘Pathétique,’ ideas that Beethoven first expressed at the age of 12. I’d say that’s part of the story, wouldn’t you?” One result of including these juvenile works is that the old numbering system for the sonatas, familiar to generations of musicians, no longer holds. Professor Cooper suggests that it is time to abandon those designations and just use opus numbers. But the idea of 32 Beethoven sonatas is so embedded in public consciousness that it won’t easily be dislodged. Mr. Barenboim’s “complete” cycle in London remains at 32. But three extras may have an interesting effect on the wider world if a scientific study recently undertaken in (of all places) Tehran, Iran, can be believed. According to this study, reported last November to the American Society for Neuroscience, prolonged exposure to the Beethoven piano sonatas has a quantifiably positive effect on people with depression. Whether more sonatas would make for even greater happiness was outside the study’s scope. But for what it’s worth, Professor Cooper, after an exposure more prolonged than most, is noticeably cheerful.

Jan 18 2008 10:43 PM EST Tom Cruise Scientology-Video Glossary: What Is He Talking About? By Jennifer Vineyard Tom Cruise talks for nine minutes in his instantly famous Scientology video — now, can anyone figure out what he's actually saying? Apparently, non-Scientologists are just "spectators." It's a far nicer thing to call us — kind of like "Muggles in "Harry Potter" — than the term they usually use, "wog," which is more equivalent to the derogatory "Mudbloods" in the "Potter" books. Here's a breakdown of some of the other Scientologese words, acronyms and turns of phrase — culled from a variety of sources, including books, Web sites, and current and former church members — that might get lost in translation: LRH: L. Ron Hubbard, founder of the Church of Scientology and author of sci-fi books such as "Battlefield Earth" and "Mission Earth." "I take this as a half-ack": What was that sound? A furball? Actually, a "half-ack" — a half-acknowledgement — means you were encouraged. In LRH's communication theory, you have to give signals to pre-clears (people who have not yet "cleared" themselves of unwanted emotions) — like "good," "OK," "I got that." Get that? KSW: Keeping Scientology Working. Refers to a policy LRH published in 1965 that requires all Scientologists to follow his words and rules exactly. "It is something that you have to earn": Cruise is referring to taking Scientology courses. According to the church, to get to the higher levels of Scientology — he's an OT VII, the highest level is OT VIII — you must complete a number of courses and auditing sessions, a sort of Scientological take on the Catholic confession. And it all costs; depending on your level, the tab for wisdom can be hundreds if not thousands of dollars. To finally learn what the basis of Scientology's precepts are (about how we got remnants of space aliens known as thetans trapped in our system), you must attain the level of OT III. The secrets of Xenu aren't free! "Am I going to look at that guy or am I too afraid?": Cruise's relentless stare is actually a technique from "Success Through Communication" training routine (TR) drills. According to former and current members, pre-clears have to learn to look someone straight in the eye for hours. It's supposed to generate self-confidence and intimidate the other party. No blinking! "... Because I have my own out-ethics": The church says ethics are moral choices but belong to a distinct moral system, based on LRH's book "Introduction to Scientology Ethics." If you misbehave, you have "out-ethics." If you're behaving, you have your ethics "in." To put your ethics "in" someone else, as Cruise later says, is to make someone else conform. "The ability to create new and better realities and improve conditions": "Conditions" refer to LRH principles, which are charted on a scale. It's a Scientologist's goal to "improve conditions," which means improving your relationship with yourself and to those within your group. The "conditions" (in order) are: confusion, treason, enemy, doubt, liability, nonexistence, danger, emergency, normal, affluence, power change and power, according to numerous accounts of church practices. These are the practical applications of "ethics." Tech: Otherwise known as "ethics tech." The methods and principles learned in Scientology courses. "Orgs are there to help": Not Orcs from "Lord of the Rings" — orgs, as in Scientology churches and other organizations, such as Narconon, Criminon and Second Chance, all of which can be found online. Criminon: Scientology group that recruits through prisons, promising alcohol and drug rehabilitation. SP: "Suppressive Person." An SP is someone who commits suppressive acts, like murder, criticizing Scientology or altering LRH's teachings, according to former and current members. Journalists are automatically considered SPs because they traffic in bad news and so are barred from entering Scientology. Psychiatrists would also be SPs, so Cruise says, "Crush these guys! I've had it! No mercy! None! Go to guns!" as a call to arms. Since all's fair in war, LRH once issued a policy called "Fair Game" that decreed that anyone who opposed Scientology could be "tricked, sued or lied to and destroyed." The church says it no longer officially practices this, however, it is still a fairly contentious organization. PTS: "Potential Trouble Sources," as in Scientologists who are losing the faith or are being influenced by an SP. PTS/SP: A course in how to "handle" and/or "disconnect" PTS and SPs, which usually costs about $1,600, according to estimates from church members. "Ways to Happiness": Actually, "A Way to Happiness," a booklet of the Scientology version of the 10 Commandments, except theirs has 21 Commandments. The number-one precept is "Take Care of Yourself." Also on the list: "Don't Be Promiscuous," "Set a Good Example," "Do Not Murder," "Do Not Harm a Person of Good Will" and "Flourish and Prosper." Perhaps "Star Trek" creator Gene Roddenberry said it more succinctly: "Live long and prosper."

That's news to me. I still haven't been approved for the list yet, so I haven't seen it. I wouldn't pay for a boot.

FRANK ZAPPA's classical work, an Amazon list.

David Ocker worked for Frank Zappa: Mixed Meters blog by David Ocker In My Perfect World The David Ocker Internet Interview

February 5, 2007 Music Review | Composer Portraits: Frank Zappa The Other Frank Zappa, Chamber Music Composer By ANNE MIDGETTE Members of the Fireworks Ensemble playing works by Frank Zappa. Frank Zappa was a kind of Rev. Howard Finster of music: an outsider artist eventually discovered and embraced by the establishment without ever losing his outsider cachet. A brilliant self-taught musician, Zappa needed to justify what he did as serious music at a time when rock was not seen as serious, and he produced a string of “classical” pieces that were taken up by European luminaries like Pierre Boulez and the Ensemble Modern. The pieces are fiendishly difficult to execute, with lots of surface complexity to dazzle the ear, as was demonstrated at the composer portrait devoted to Zappa at the Miller Theater on Friday night, two weeks after another concert devoted to one of his idols, Edgard Varèse. The program had three parts. First came music for smaller chamber ensembles, played by Zephyros Winds and a string quintet, including music originally written for the Aspen Wind Quintet (“Times Beach II” and “Times Beach III”) and the Kronos Quartet (“None of the Above”). Then came music for chamber orchestra, conducted by Jeffrey Milarsky, some of it, like “The Girl With the Magnesium Dress,” arranged from pieces Zappa wrote on an instrument called the Synclavier. Finally there were arrangements of music for rock ensemble — including “G-Spot Tornado” — performed by the Fireworks Ensemble, the eight-member group that set up the whole concert. Despite the program-note allegations that these pieces were equally just plain music, the sense that rock had to assume some kind of classical mantle to gain respect still lingered around the first two parts of the program, which felt like a dinner jacket pulled out of mothballs for a formal occasion, not least because the players seemed on their best, slightly subdued behavior. And while the music was filled with striking gestures — breathtakingly fast unison passages, moments when the supporting instruments held a note while a flute scampered off on a rapid phrase, plenty of adroit quotations echoing other composers — its complexities didn’t weave together to make a coherent statement. Epitomizing this tendency was “The Perfect Stranger,” Zappa’s longest work for chamber ensemble, an illustrative piece about a door-to-door vacuum-cleaner salesman (opening with the doorbell’s ring) that disintegrated into a pile of isolated individual moments. Like an ornate frieze adorning a simple one-room house, the decoration was more sophisticated than the architecture. But with the change of nomenclature and mood in the rock part of the show, a whole new feeling came into the auditorium, as if, formalities now concluded, everyone could kick off shoes and dance till dawn. Brian Coughlin, Fireworks’ director and bass player, produced some hell-for-leather arrangements that the players, now relaxed and grooving, played the heck out of, down to show-stopping solos in “The Purple Lagoon/Approximate.” Finally labels did indeed cease to matter: this was just music, and it sounded like music to keep.

Biography Discography

January 19, 2008 Music Review | Making Music: Pierre Boulez Revisiting the Works of a Former Firebrand to See if They’re Still Warm to the Touch By VIVIEN SCHWEITZER, NYTimes In 1952 Pierre Boulez wrote that “any musician who has not felt ... the necessity of the dodecaphonic language is of no use.” A year after this youthful, narrow-minded declaration, Mr. Boulez indulged his open-minded interest in the music of foreign cultures by evoking non-European sounds in a chamber work featuring a groundbreaking combination of instruments. That nine-movement work, “Le Marteau Sans Maître” (“The Hammer With No Master”), was performed by the dynamic, young Lucerne Festival Academy Ensemble on Thursday at Zankel Hall, part of a Making Music concert dedicated to Mr. Boulez’s music and with Ara Guzelimian as host. Mr. Boulez, on hand to conduct his music, explained that his colleagues thought the unusual scoring for alto flute, viola, guitar, vibraphone, xylophone, percussion and contralto was not only weird, but that it also posed innumerable challenges because the technique of European percussionists was then rather “primitive.” Mr. Boulez recalled that the percussionists used only two mallets, which seems “prehistoric” (since four are now standard). Percussionists used to play the way he types, he said, using one finger — hard to imagine, given the number of percussion virtuosos who are now active, like those who played with aplomb on Thursday. There were also fine contributions from the notable contralto Hilary Summers, whose expressive voice and distinctive timbre illuminated the zigzagging vocal lines of the three surrealist poems by René Char in “Le Marteau.” The sonorities in the work, a homage to Schoenberg’s “Pierrot Lunaire,” are often bewitching. But the exotic sounds are still part of Mr. Boulez’s stern serialist language, and the piece sometimes feels interminably static. But the opposite is true of Mr. Boulez’s riotously kaleidoscopic “Sur Incises,” written more than 40 years later and scored for an equally unusual lineup of three harpists, three pianists and three percussionists. The often relentlessly driven, exuberant piece (based on “Incises,” an earlier short piano work) is sometimes so exhilaratingly intense that you’re almost grateful for the intermittent periods of sonorous calm, as if you were retreating into a quiet corridor from a room crammed with brilliant people shouting out ideas at full blast. The “organized delirium” (as Mr. Boulez calls it) of “Sur Incises” demonstrates a remarkable mellowing of the organized tedium of early serialism. It was certainly hard to imagine Mr. Boulez, dapper and charming as he amiably chatted with Mr. Guzelimian, as the polarizing firebrand he once was. “I like virtuosity not for the sake of virtuosity but because it’s dangerous,” Mr. Boulez said before conducting “Sur Incises.” The talented young players of the Lucerne Festival Academy Ensemble clearly enjoy living on the edge, hurtling through the riotous landscapes of “Sur Incises” with that rare combination of reckless abandon and polished professionalism.

exactly.

thnx!

There's a CT list?

Pat Metheny and Brad Mehldau - All The Things You Are

It doesn't look like they paid the rent on it lately.

The Surprisingly Serious Tale of Comedian Groucho Marx and His Lifelong Quest to Master Guitar

I doubt we're going to get that from Norah. She sure is cute.

And curves. Skin and curves.

i'd like to see the angie dickinson shot! Is this it? All I see is skin. She could walk past me on the street and I wouldn't know who she is.