7/4

Ah...you see? I thought I heard that somewhere. Time for me to drag these out and give them a listen again.

I don't read comic strips I don't like.

He looks kinda like Lemmy.

It would be nice if ECM could be bothered to number the tracks on the cover. There must be something wrong with me if need to know, right?

Who?

Dude...you're such a buzz kill. You took out the funny shit.

Jimmy Vaughn holding a Gretch. It's too big to upload.

Dance on his grave Alexander.

wow. RIP. When I read that Johnny Hart died at his storyboard, I thought about Warne Marsh. Both men died while doing what they lived for. Oh yeah, nothing wrong with that...

My mom's birthday or the sopranos? Your Mom of course. Happy 80th Birthday Mom! My Mother will be 84 in a few weeks.

there's an article about it in the NY Times.

no lyrics, old story.

I was once told Ted Nugent was important because he sold lots of albums.

holy friggin' crap. it's the internet police!

It's about the harmonic series!

We never do that here. Have fun with the clarinet and oboe. I was talked out of playing oboe and handed a clarinet when I was very young. I dropped clarinet to concentrate on piano before I was 9. Both are beautiful instruments, no matter what the context. Jazz needs more of both. I'm doing OK, too much day job means not enough time to play guitar. Enjoy youth while you can!

:eye: hubba hubba...

April 8, 2007 Music A Mutual Inspiration Society in Action By NATE CHINEN FOR the last few weeks the guitarist Pat Metheny and the pianist Brad Mehldau have been conducting an almost nightly experiment. On a cross-country string of concerts in support of their fine recent Nonesuch albums — “Metheny Mehldau,” which has sold more than 30,000 copies since September, and “Quartet,” released on March 13 — they have been combining two of modern jazz’s most distinctive personalities, in a mercurial sort of chemistry. And the results are exceeding some high expectations. At the McCallum Theater in Palm Desert, Calif., one week into the tour, they played exquisitely together, without the slightest hint of accommodation. Along with a handful of intensely focused duets, they explored some radiant and dynamic new material with Mr. Mehldau’s regular rhythm team, the bassist Larry Grenadier and the drummer Jeff Ballard. The songs were all originals, largely by Mr. Metheny, and they advanced an uncommon synthesis of melodic ease and harmonic sophistication. The music sounded more fully realized than on the albums, which were recorded in a single week in 2005. It sounded like the vivid hybrid one might hope for from Mr. Metheny and Mr. Mehldau, who are to perform at Carnegie Hall on Wednesday night. They are strikingly different musicians by temperament: Mr. Metheny tends to come across as effusive, Mr. Mehldau as introspective. The Pat Metheny Group, formed 30 years ago, is a broad-canvas electric ensemble with a burnished sensibility, while the Brad Mehldau Trio, just over a decade old, is a graceful and sonorous acoustic jazz combo. But there are affinities between the two beyond their popularity and virtuosity. Each has developed an individual solo vocabulary on his instrument, as well as a deep attunement to ensemble interplay. Both are dedicated students of the post-bop jazz tradition who have also been deeply influenced by classical music, Brazilian music and harmonically sophisticated pop. (Mr. Metheny once toured with Joni Mitchell; Mr. Mehldau is the only nonsinger on the star-studded Joni Mitchell tribute album Nonesuch is releasing this month.) “We’re drinking from the same waters,” Mr. Mehldau said one morning a month before the tour. Minutes earlier Mr. Metheny had suggested that the artists were “part of the same tribe.” Sitting side by side in Nonesuch’s Midtown office, they were discussing their collaboration in terms both analytical and abstract. Mr. Metheny, 52, is the elder of the pair. Born and raised in Lee’s Summit, Mo., he began playing professionally in Kansas City as a teenager, later dropping out of college to join the vibraphonist Gary Burton’s band. In 1975 he made his remarkable debut as a leader, “Bright Size Life,” initiating what would evolve into an acclaimed and irreducibly expansive solo career. His early albums, notably “As Falls Wichita, So Falls Wichita Falls,” a collaboration with the pianist Lyle Mays, were among the first jazz recordings to make an impression on Mr. Mehldau. “Pat’s music is just already in my playing, the way Miles Davis is,” Mr. Mehldau said, recalling his upbringing in West Hartford, Conn. Now 36 he has earned a reputation as perhaps the most accomplished jazz musician of his generation, with a string of impressive albums stretching back a dozen years. Another precocious talent, Mr. Mehldau entered the mainstream jazz consciousness in 1994, as a sideman on a Warner Brothers album by the saxophonist Joshua Redman. Mr. Metheny — who heard a track from the album on a car radio, he has recalled, and was so fascinated by the pianist that he pulled over to the shoulder of the road — had been featured on Mr. Redman’s previous album, released in 1993. “Brad’s appearance on the scene was really significant to me,” Mr. Metheny said, “because I just recognized immediately so many of the ideals that I aspire to myself, rendered in a way that was unbelievably refreshing.” Pressed to elaborate, he focused on the improviser’s art of melodic development, which at its best conveys “the sense of inevitability” along with a spirit of discovery. “Brad embodies the quest for taking ideas and letting them sort of bloom in really extended ways,” he said. Naturally that quest is a guiding force of “Metheny Mehldau,” which consists almost entirely of duets. Some, as they unfold, do suggest the pairing of inevitability and discovery. “Annie’s Bittersweet Cake,” a piece by Mr. Mehldau, has a discursive melody that Mr. Metheny happily executes and then expands. And on “Make Peace,” one of Mr. Metheny’s pastoral tunes, Mr. Mehldau employs a subtle chromaticism while his partner strums in the background. Even at its most rarefied, their rapport sounds easy. The most potent material on the album, though, is a pair of tracks with the full quartet. “Ring of Life” lands with a jolt, thanks to a hyperkinetic beat by Mr. Ballard; “Say the Brother’s Name” percolates more gently but no less insistently. Both songs anticipate “Quartet,” a more immediately gripping album than its predecessor. Yet “Quartet” also fulfills a cycle of completion. The light it sheds is magnanimous. Retroactively the first album feels stronger and clearer because of it. Pianists and guitarists in a jazz rhythm section often have to put effort into staying out of each other’s way: it’s an inherent drawback to the overlapping ranges of the instruments, and (at least where jazz is concerned) the overlapping roles. Mr. Metheny has spent 30 years in a prolific partnership with Mr. Mays, while Mr. Mehldau has worked on an off with the guitarists Kurt Rosenwinkel and Peter Bernstein. Not surprisingly, Mr. Mehldau and Mr. Metheny cite the same album — “Smokin’ at the Half Note,” with Wes Montgomery on guitar and Wynton Kelly on piano — as formative. Remarkably the Metheny-Mehldau quartet doesn’t sound like the Montgomery-Kelly band — or the Pat Metheny Group, or even the Brad Mehldau Trio Plus Pat Metheny. “To me it all boils down to being less about the instruments and more about the quality of listening,” Mr. Metheny said. “And as a subtext, the idea of approaching things with a sense of orchestration, which somehow I think both Brad and I almost naturally do.” He added that he saw the quartet’s music as distinct from anything in his own history. “I wouldn’t know where to place it on a spectrum, formwise, structurewise, soundwise,” he said. “And actually that’s something that I really like about Brad’s stuff in general: It’s very difficult to place it on the spectrum.” Mr. Mehldau nodded. “That’s a great compliment,” he said, before reciprocating in kind. “I think what any musician hopes for is to get to the point where Pat has, where the music’s been out and has seeped into the world. And it’s not so much ‘That’s hard to place.’ It’s: ‘Oh, he made a new place. He created an identity.’ ” There is evidence on “Quartet” to support two identities. “Towards the Light” could pass for a Pat Metheny Group composition, with its guitar-synthesizer timbres and mounting drama. “Santa Cruz Slacker” is a harmonically subversive stroll easily traceable to Mr. Mehldau. On “En la Tierra Que No Olvida,” a tango by Mr. Metheny, Mr. Mehldau begins his solo with an indirect quotation of Mr. Metheny’s classic “Bright Size Life”; both artists said they had missed the accidental allusion. Mr. Grenadier, the bassist, who has worked in trios with both Mr. Mehldau and Mr. Metheny, attested to an evolutionary leap during the first week of the tour. “On the record you have Brad’s tune ‘Fear and Trembling,’ ” he said by telephone from Mesa, Ariz. “That to me is a great example of Pat moving into Brad’s trio world. Maybe on the record that’s a bit more separated. Here’s a tune like that, and here’s one where the trio moves into Pat’s world. In the live context, every tune is a combination.” Those words rang true in Palm Desert, where the concert began with a chamberlike duo set and led into “A Night Away,” a buoyant full-group invocation jointly composed by Mr. Mehldau and Mr. Metheny. Over the next two hours the group played songs from both albums, along with two new Metheny contributions: a skittering samba and a blazing Ornette Coleman- inspired blues. “The Sound of Water,” a diaphanous duet featuring Mr. Metheny’s 42-string Pikasso acoustic guitar, felt much more substantial than on record, partly because Mr. Mehldau expressed himself so emphatically. Next week marks the end of the tour, but not the full extent of the Metheny-Mehldau partnership. Both musicians took part in “Pilgrimage,” the final album by the saxophonist Michael Brecker, who died in January. “It’s one of the most exciting records I’ve ever been a part of,” Mr. Mehldau said of the album, scheduled for release in May. And there are sure to be other intersections, possibly including a live release, given that the tour is being recorded. Presumably Nonesuch caught a few of the transitory highlights of the Palm Desert concert, like Mr. Ballard’s ferocious and textured locomotion on “Ring of Life,” beneath a searching guitar-synth solo. Perhaps there’s documentation of the encore, a floating waltz by Mr. Metheny called “Bachelors III.” In its original incarnation on record, it was a duet, fine-featured and crisp. It sounded a shade darker as a quartet piece, and its post-bop harmonic terrain gave Mr. Mehldau and Mr. Metheny ample space for elaboration. Each played the song as if he owned it, and in the most important sense, they were both right.

I'm enjoying this, I've been meaning to check Emily out, now I'll have to buy all her solo albums.

I'm listening. This just doesn't look like her: ->

I want to hear the trio!

some of us won't go away.

I can't make one of their gigs, but I hope they record a gig for DVD release.

What? No bark?