JSngry

All the more reason for a Mosaic! Not sure how they would? Not sure how they could? Not sure that they should? It's a general-circulation magazine not a social service, right? Country club or not, a minimum security prison still houses felons who have lost some rights, but I'm pretty sure that access to Down Beat is not one of them. Nor am I sure that Down Beat would have access to a Sex Offender Down Beat Subscriber register.

reasonable enough request, done.

They even have menthols.

It's a boxy sounding recording from a boxy little club (no dis, just the reality). Later recordists inside the club have worked around that (and the available technology has improved), but none have eliminated it.

No list complete without these:

You should reach out to him in your Vote For Hank initiative. Every vote matters! quite apart from that, what stirred the letters talking about people complaining about political comments?

Just found this quote, no idea how accurate it is or from what context it comes, but when I was referencing "science" earlier as it pertains to how Gould's Bach is striking me, here it is:

And truthfully, to get all macro about it, what is the difference between "interactive" and "supportive" anyway? I know that the best support IS interactive and the best interaction is supportive, so...no matter how you go about it, it should all come down to

Yep. And Wilbur Ware as well, although he was not nearly as extroverted about it as Mingus. Still... I get why LaFaro is venerated for what he did, but I am not into the "idolatry" around him as somebody who just appeared out of nowhere doing things that had never been conceived of before. Bill Evans of the time was the perfect foil for him, Evans left "blanks" that he wanted "filled in" in the interest of an ongoing conversations, and LaFaro was perfect for that. It was a true and natural synergy. But it's not like he had no precedent in terms of being an interactive, as opposed to supportive role,

so many bass players lowered their action to gain speed at the expense of a good/fat sound, at least some of this was in reaction to Scott LaFaro's processes. I've ehard differing accounts of how much LaFaro's facility was due to a lowered action and how much was just plain old hard work (and re-evaluating him a few years ago, his tone was bigger than I remembered it being), so I can't really hold him responsible. But then as now, I point to Mingus as the still-definitive example of how a bassist can "do it all" - have/keep great time, have a big fat sound in all registers & in all tempos, and play interactively with the front line. Mingus, FTW as far as OG All That.

I wasn't in any way thinking of Tristano/Gould in terms of actual personal interaction. just a braoder consideration of ego vs id in the musical process. I think there's no small validity to Tristano's observations there, the whole notion of "pure music" as an ideal, and I wonder if that could be looped around to Gould's concepts. Mental masturbation, perhaps.

A record is a record and it will almost alwaus sound like a record in some way. It's best to learn to make the adjustments, no matter how difficult some of the are. If the playing's good, that can be done with no hard feelings. If the playing's not so good....grrrrrrrr......

So...what mastering was used for the BN High Step issue of the 70s? Would it have been downgraded from the original or would it have used the original, since it was all one big happy corporate family by then?

Maybe he got blue in the face about it and gave up, but that was a running theme of so many of Chuck Nessa's comments during the glory days of the reissue boom.

I doubt I'll ever begin to fathom all that goes into the notion of historically accurate performance practices, so/but as it petains to Bach, is Bernstein just bullshitting here, using "interpretation" as an excuse for projecting, perhaps even using it as a gateway seduction to actual improvisation? Is this guy a degenerate, or does he have an honest to gor point here? Full program here (Gould playing, Eileen Farrel singing, and Stravinsky conducting!), and I should have found this a long time ago...oh well. Network freaking television! Originally aired on January 31, 1960 on CBS Television as part of its Ford Presents series, this program was entitled "The Creative Performer." The entire show is actually three performances — by Gould, the soprano Eileen Farrell (singing the "Suicidio!" aria from *La Gioconda*), & Igor Stravinsky (conducting the last three scenes of his ballet *The Firebird*) — punctuated with scintillating musicological lectures by Maestro-Professor Bernstein, who is arguably the star of the show. Though I recommend watching the program in its entirety, here's a time-stamped playlist, in case you'd like to jump to any given section: 1. Leonard Bernstein, on the vagaries of score notations: 0:00 - 12:56 2. Leonard Bernstein, intro to Gould: 12:57 - 18:02 3. Glenn Gould: 18:03 - 27:08 4. Leonard Bernstein, intro to Farrell: 27:09 - 33:46 5. Eileen Farrell: 33:47 - 38:24 6. Leonard Bernstein, intro to Stravinsky: 38:25 - 40:05 7. Igor Stravinsky: 40:06 - 51:06 8. Closing Credits: 51:07 - 52:24

I'm trying to understand what, in general, it is about Gould that those who don't enjoy him, Is it the sense of a-historical perfomrance practice, is it that it just sounds ugly, what is it, exactly, apart from simply "not liking it"? Is it Gould in general or is it Gould doing Bach like he does? Wondering how/if this would/could fit into a Bach/Tristano/ego vs id thing. It seems to me that there's a least a thread of thought to begin to engage in there?

Both volumes, yes.

I get your pain point on this, but I just wonder why there's like umpteen bajillion complaints about "70s bass sound" and maybe 0.0000000000211% about cymbal sounds, not just from then but from going forth. I just don't get that. I can handle the bad bass sound (unless it's a combination of super low action AND bad miking), but a thin-ass ride that either pings or whitenoises instead of creating a good full bodied cushion of overtones, that's something I just cringe about without fail. And it's all driven by amplification, simple as that. Some people know how to use it, some don't, and worst of all, some just don't care.

As much a it pains me to recommend this label... But if you want one record from within that set, go for Hot Line.

No Bill Barron?

Thanks for calling these to my attention! It's funny what you say about the hammers bouncing...I've been listening to him a lot in my car, and I never want to trust what I hear in that environment too much in terms of timbre/coloration, but there were a few times, just a few, where Gould's piano had this really weir "aftersound" that reminded me of an old Wurlitzer electric piano. I was thinking, oh my, how jacked up is this car system, or how jacked up was this remastering, but maybe that's what it was, bouncing hammers. Or maybe not. I've never heard that claim before, but would not even begin to dispute it!

The science of harmonic weight, gravitational pull, that which perhaps is generally labeled as "theory" but in my mind is still a science. Conventional theory goes hand in hand with the science of acoustics, and although I learned the former far better than the latter, I still learned enough to respect the interrelatedness of the two. And then factor in the physics of the effects of attack, duration, etc, Newtonian principles applied to the motion of sound, yeah, that too. If you hit a note forcefully and sustain it, that's a different arc than an abrupt staccato or a slowly attacked note left to sustain. Different arcs, different shapes, different actions/reactions, science. You may say that these are not truly "physical" events, but if you can accept that music/science/physics all have substantial and legitimate overlapping, then yes, they are. And yes, to my ears, the tensions and releases in Gould's Bach come from the impact of every note being left open for its full duration to go to wherever the next one is. To use today's vernacular, it's a very "hi-def" presentation of these "schematics", each note has a life of its own, as does the one before, and the one after. And yes, I get that Rosen is expressing an appreciation for the more traditional, articulation-averse approach. And I certainly appreciate that. I'm not saying that one is better than the other, just Gould's approach reveals things that the other one doesn't, and vice versa. And right now, I am very much enjoying Gould's approach. I will say that, to my ears at this time, the older approach seems to highlight the notion that the listener will instinctively prefer the flow of phrases over the specific value of each note, get the phrase/shape first and then get the specifics if they matter to you.. What I hear in Gould is more or less putting the music under a higher-resolution microscope, so that we first experience each note, and then the phrases fall into place more or less effortlessly. Like I said earlier, there are time with Gould where, yeah, I'm listening to both hands going on and then all of a sudden there's this "there" there that was likely there all along, but the way Gould does it, he lets it grown onto you, he doesn't hand it to you on a plate of presentation. Implicit in this approach is the notion that you - the listener - SHOULD hear the notes first and then feel the phrases, and that is definitely not the "traditional" idea of how to present Bach (or a lot of other music, really, the notion being that the player masters the details so the audience doesn't have to deal with them and gets presented with the final product of details in service of something less tangible, emotion, being moved, etc.) So indeed, there is an element of aggression, effrontery, snottiness, perhaps even hostility in the very notion of Gould deciding, and unambiguously so, the he is going to do this music this way, all-in, no looking back. Maybe it is that, but...I like it, at least now I do.

I think I hear the quality you describe, but "pecking" is not the word I myself would use to describe it. What I don't hear in Gould is as much ambient/room sound as in other piano recordings, the "blur" of a performance recorded to capture the ambience of the room/hall/whatever. I hear gould looking away from that model and instead looking to, as I said earlier, give each note it's own, fullest space without any transient(?) overflow into the next. I guess that could be heard as "pecking", I look at it more as "scientific objectivity", and ok, yeah, that might not be what everybody wants out of anything, but Bach's is definitely one music that can not only stand up to that type of approach, but actually flourish with it. People talk about "do the math", well hell, do THIS math, right? Of course, it's math in the "praise of god" not just math for math's sake, but I don't hear Gould doing math for math's sake. Don't know how much I hear him "praising god" either, but there's definitely a sense of revelation and reverence in how he plays this stuff.

The ones that I have a particular "affection" for are the ones for non-reissued items, new releases. I think I got a George Russell, and at least one Andrew Hill. Why that is, I will attempt to neither justify nor analyze.