7/4

That's a minor 2nd. A minor 9th is an octave plus a minor 2nd. If we really want to confuse things, we could call it a 17th.

Makes me want to order some CDs...

By Ashley Kahn (author of the Kind of Blue Book) and Ravi Coltrane.

Yeah man, it kicks my ass. I can see myself going into another period of listening to nothing but late period Coltrane.

The Rite of Spring for four hands rocks. I saw/heard a performance at Columbia U about 10 years ago.

And Jimmy Page too.

That's a twisted little blue halo you have there.

October 12, 2005 A Big Debate on Little People: Ancient Species or Modern Dwarfs? By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD New discoveries in a cave on the Indonesian island of Flores, notably another jawbone, appear to give additional support to the idea that a separate species of little people new to science and now extinct lived there as recently as 12,000 years ago. But a vigorous minority of skeptical scientists were unmoved by the new findings. They contend that the skeletal remains are more likely to be deformed modern human beings, not a distinct species. The group of Australian and Indonesian researchers who announced the first findings a year ago and proclaimed the new species Homo floresiensis describe the additional bones in a report to be published tomorrow in the journal Nature. They said the bones were fragments of nine individuals of unusually small stature, little more than three feet tall, and, judging by one skull, with brains the size of a chimpanzee's. The newly discovered lower jaw was almost identical to one previously found, except that it appeared to be 3,000 years younger. "We can now reconstruct the body proportions of H. floresiensis with some certainty," the scientists, led by Michael J. Morwood and Peter Brown, both of the University of New England in Australia, said in the report. "The finds further demonstrate," they continued, that the original skull and partial skeleton was not from "an aberrant or pathological individual, but is representative of a long-term population" that was present during the period from 95,000 to 12,000 years ago. The implication that made the original discovery a year ago such a sensation was that these "little people of Flores," as they are commonly called, represent a distinct species that shared the earth with modern humans far more recently than anyone had supposed. In a commentary in the journal, Daniel E. Lieberman, a biological anthropologist at Harvard University, said, "All in all, it seems reasonable for Morwood and colleagues to stick to their original hypothesis that H. floresiensis is a new species." But Dr. Lieberman noted that the authors were less certain of the new species' lineage than they had been a year ago. Then the discovery team speculated that the little people had evolved from Homo erectus, the immediate predecessor of Homo sapiens. Now they suggest in the report that the species may descend more directly from earlier members of the human family, like the australopithecines, the group the famous 3.2-million-year-old Lucy belonged to. In an exchange of e-mail messages from Australia, Dr. Brown said, "The limb proportions, stature, brain size and skeletal robusticity of H. floresiensis replicated those in Australopithecus afarensis, not in any member of our genus Homo." Dr. Brown said he was preparing to publish results of research that could explain what, if any, connection the little people had to Lucy. But some paleontologists and biologists express strong doubts that the little people represent a new species. Two separate groups, including Indonesians, Australians, Americans and Britons, said this week that they were about to submit reports to a journal that they say refute the new-species hypothesis. "I don't think anything is changed with this paper," Robert D. Martin, a biological anthropologist and provost at the Field Museum in Chicago, said in a telephone interview, referring to the latest Nature report. "I feel very strongly that these people are glossing over the problems with this interpretation." In Dr. Martin's view, in which he is joined by several prominent scientists, the more likely explanation for the small stature is, in part, a phenomenon known as island dwarfing. People and animals living in isolation for many generations tend to evolve smaller bodies, their growth constrained by limited resources. Dr. Lieberman, who wrote the commentary in Nature, said the dwarfing issue could be resolved if fossils of much earlier specimens of the Flores people were discovered. "If the island-dwarfing hypothesis is correct," he wrote, "then the island's earliest inhabitants should be larger than the Liang Bua fossils." Liang Bua is the cave at a remote Flores village where archaeologists found the first bones of the little people two years ago. Besides the skull and jaw, the bones included limbs and other fragments in deposits dating from 18,000 years ago; they were accompanied by remarkably advanced stone tools. The latest finds were from trenches at various depths and thus ages, some as recent as 12,000 years ago, indicating that the cave was occupied for tens of thousands of years. Another possibility raised by the skeptics is that the discoverers happened to come on a people suffering from microcephaly, a disorder that causes abnormally small brain growth and other deformities. Recently, British researchers examined the skull of a microcephalic individual at the Royal College of Surgeons of England and found that its braincase appeared to match that of the Flores specimen. Robert B. Eckhardt, a professor of developmental genetics at Penn State, complained that the new report on the additional jaw failed to support the thesis that these people were a separate species. "All the paper tells us is that they have identified an early population of small people," Dr. Eckhardt said. "What we are disputing is that people with the brain size of a chimp made these stone tools in the cave. The easiest explanation is that the specimen with the small brain has a small brain because it is abnormal, not a new species."

I picked this up this afternoon. Works for me.

October 13, 2005 Film Puts a New Focus on the Master of 'Ethiojazz' By BEN SISARIO In Jim Jarmusch's latest movie, "Broken Flowers," a graying former ladies' man played by Bill Murray has a strange companion with him as he searches for some old girlfriends, one of whom may have borne his son. He's gloomy but intrigued by the quest, and his mood is matched by the passenger in his rental car: a CD of brooding and mysterious music, a little funky and a little slithery, a bit like a 1970's blaxploitation soundtrack and a bit like dense modal jazz. He never seems to know what to make of it, but he clearly likes it. The music is a particularly obscure vintage made in Ethiopia in the late 1960's and early 70's by a jazz innovator named Mulatu Astatke, and thanks to "Broken Flowers" and an acclaimed series of CD's, his music has enjoyed a little renaissance lately. A prominent figure in Ethiopia but barely known to Western listeners, Mr. Astatke makes a rare United States appearance tonight at Joe's Pub with the Either/Orchestra, an avant-garde jazz group that has championed him. From the moment Mr. Jarmusch first heard it, about six years ago, the music got under his skin, he said, and he began seeking it out wherever he could find it. "When I was writing 'Broken Flowers,' " he said by phone from his home in the Catskills, "I was listening to a lot of his music, and I was thinking, 'How do I get this music into a film that's set in suburban America?' It even led me to make the character of Jeffrey Wright of Ethiopian descent." In the film, Mr. Wright's character, Mr. Murray's next-door neighbor, gets him started on his journey and hands him the disc. Several songs by Mr. Astatke are used prominently in the film, and are on the soundtrack album, released by Decca. Mr. Astatke, a vibraphonist and bandleader, had a suitably cosmopolitan upbringing for a music that blends jazz with funk, Latin music and traditional Ethiopian five-tone scales. Born in 1943 in the western Ethiopian city of Jimma, he was one of the few musicians of his generation to be educated abroad. He went to the Trinity College of Music in London, where he studied clarinet, harmony and theory, and in the early 60's attended the Schillinger House of Music in Boston, now the Berklee College of Music. "My whole idea," he said by phone the other day from his home in Addis Ababa, "was sort of fusion with Ethiopian and jazz and modern music. I started at Berklee this idea of the 'Ethiojazz' business. From there I came to New York and I had this group, and what I wanted to do, I did it there." His group in New York, the Ethiopian Quintet, was mostly Puerto Rican. He recorded two albums in the 60's on a small New York label, Worthy. He jammed with Dave Pike, who was Herbie Mann's vibraphonist at the time, and remembers his time here fondly. "We had all these big bands," he said. "And the Village Gate, the Village Vanguard, the Palladium - there were all these clubs around at that time." He was surprised and delighted to learn that the Vanguard is still in business. "It's still around?" he said. "Fantastic! Wow!" Mr. Astatke returned to Ethiopia in the late 60's and took part in a fertile musical scene there in the waning years of Emperor Haile Selassie, who was deposed in 1974. Establishing himself as a jazz ambassador, he brought the Hammond organ and vibraphone to Ethiopia. "I changed the whole Ethiopian music," he said without shyness, "combining jazz and fusion with the Ethiopian five-tone scales. Since then my name has been on the very, very top of the Ethiopian musical scene." The music of that period, influenced by American funk and soul, is being collected in "Éthiopiques," a series of albums on the French label Buda Musique, which since the late 90's has run to 20 volumes. Mr. Astatke's disc, Vol. 4, is its best seller and has seen a bump in sales since "Broken Flowers" was released in August. It is now selling about 1,800 copies a week, said a spokeswoman for Allegro, the albums' American distributor; that is equivalent to the sales of a new album by a world music star like Youssou N'Dour. Last year the Either/Orchestra, led by the saxophonist and composer Russ Gershon, performed in Addis Ababa and met Mr. Astatke. The group has since brought him to the United States for concerts twice, the first times Mr. Astatke had performed in New York in many years. After performing at Joe's Pub tonight, they will go on a brief Northeastern tour, traveling to Boston, Philadelphia, Washington and Colgate University in Hamilton, N.Y. Mr. Astatke said he had been following news of "Broken Flowers" by e-mail ("I'm very far away") but had not yet seen them film in its entirety. He added, with a laugh, "I'm going to see it in New York."

You'd either have to go to Connecticut or southward to play- it's not in NY. ← Where to play.

Yeah, it's pouring out there.

Cheater. ← You must be new in town...

Oh...how about that! Sorry Jim, couldn't help myself. Note to self...don't drink and post.