JSngry

The Capps Conundrum. Calls for a new rule, I think, or at least a refinement of the current one. Because looking at that, it sure looks like a highly refined quick-step, which is most definitely called a balk.

http://www.dar.org/constitution-hall/constitution-hall-history Betty,here. Sammy, here. Miles, not here. Alto player or tenor player? Odds are that Jarrett was on the band, if 1971 was the date.

I link my thoughts to none of Neil Young's in no way except to say that the phrase "AM did it better" stirs resonates with me in the ways I've delineated. As to what degree, if any, Neil Young has any similar resonances, you really would be better off taking it up with him. As a matter of principle, though, I will say that it is not infrequent that a simple statement that at first seems idiotic becomes less so when the context which spawned it comes into clearer focus. Other side of that is that people who go for soundbites should set the table before serving. Bottom line, pivot long since pivoted, and fuck Neil Young, if you want to understand why streaming is still fucking with the entire industry, you have to look at where that industry is coming from, and in modern terms, that beings with AM Radio, specifically how radio itself shifted and survived the PostWar emergence and eventual domination of TV as the format of choice for program-based entertainment (extra fun in looking at how Hollywood handled the same transition). Then you go to the movement of R&B to R&R, again, AM radio is the crucial element, and then the sociological math of Top 40 radio (if you don't know who the name, Gordon McClendon, check him out), and then...then the advent of "underground" radio, which was really the first time FM had been used as a tool on anything resembling a small scale (hell, I don't think that I myself owned a car that had anything besides and AM radio until well into the 1970s, and even then it cost extra), and then from there (the apex of American Music Radio, afaic), uh-oh, here we go, "Album Rock" and the shift from AM to FM as Popular Radio Format Of Choice, and, but wait, there's more, the rise of programming consultants, and the slow decline into formats, which then led to market myopia, the segmentation of tastes, and then you start seeing things really going bad, listener curiosity no longer needed, just find what they already like and give them that, and, oh by the way, start getting militant about it if you can, REAL Rock, REAL Country, REAL Soul, all that bullshit. And then, Napster, cat out of bag, get and listen to ONLY hwat you want. Good or bad depends entirely on listener, but, definitely, DEFINITELY different as business and as social practices and norms. Does anybody remember how avant-garde Sha-Na-Na was perceived when they had their first visibility? If you blinked, you missed it, but, still...looking back as a concept meant pulling out of the mainstream. Top 40 AM, I swear to god, you could hear Frank Sinatra and then The Doors and then Bobby Goldsboro and then Steppenwolf and then a commercial or three, and then The Cowsills and then Cream and then Roy Clark and then Jimi Hendrix, all day long, because the product was plentiful, the outlets relatively few, and getting a broader audience instead of a targeted one was Good Business. It worked until it didn't, but when it did, jeezus leweesus, you had an industry, a pretty damn big industry, and did it spill over into jazz, hell yes it spilled over into jazz. And now, not so much, any of it. Is streaming technology saving the music industry?Bottom line - THIS music industry, you don't have without radio, AM Radio in particular. What kind of an industry WILL you have with streaming, that's the question that everybody's still not yet able to answer. That's "The End", at least for now... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-a6d0QVKD0

Just sayin' - the type of AM that Neil Young is talking about (and the kind that I grew up on, and I'm 10 years younger than him) was fundamentally different in the 50s/60s/early 70s than the kind you grew up with. Young might have been talking about "sound quality", but again, that means something other than just metrics to some people, and yes, the nostalgia factor is very high in driving the perception. But objectively, yes, AM did have its own "sound", and yes, people of the pre-Album Rock era DID master their singles to sound "good" within the boundaries of that "sound", just buy the 45s of the time, you can hear it very clearly, the same cut on the LP of the time did not sound like the single. More than one producer is known to have mixed/mastered their records on car speakers and or cheap home/hi-fi speakers, because they know that that was how most people would be listening to their records. As I hope I've made clear by now, Neil Young is not somebody to whom I look for to get a clear analytical dissection of too much of anything. But his statement, "AM did it better", like I said, I felt some of that, because I know what he's talking about as far as he's talking about it. I also think that the whole "shrinking industry" thing needs to be looked in precisely the terms of "captive audience" that made AM Top 40 such a powerful force when it was one. The industry had the power, literally, to have their songs heard by, in a major city, tens of thousands of people at the same exact time, no matter where they were. In the car, on the beach, on your job, sleeping, fucking, getting high, doing your homework, taking a shit, taking a bath, doesn't matter - you heard what your station's DJ played the same time as everybody else heard it. That's a captive audience, and that is something that streaming does not provide. Streaming allows to get to what you want to get to whenever you can get around to it. That used to be one of the reasons so why you bought a record, to have the freedom to hear your music that way (and anybody else my age, is your memories that girls bought more singles than albums, and guys were the other way about it?). Think about that - once the audience tuned into the station, the only control they had over what they were going to hear was to turn that station off. So yeah, captive audience in a way that streaming is inherently designed to prevent. Even a thing like Pandora, where they throw shit at you to see what sticks, you're hearing just what you're hearing, not what 50,00 other people are hearing the same time you are. And don't get me started on "regional hits"...that was part of the fun in scanning the AM dial after dark, to pull in those stations that were still up and on. Not all stations played the same hits, and even the ones they did play got emphasized differently in different markets. KLIF, WNOE, and WLS, you heard a lot of the same songs, but not ALL the same songs (and not even the same songs on the same stations all through the day). Hell, in Gladewater, deep in the heart of semi-rural East texas, KLUE in Longview & KTTB in Tyler...two different worlds, both played Top 40. Whole 'nother world then. So, if Neil Young is seen as saying that AM had objectively better sound quality statistics, then yeah, he's full of shit. But if he meant more than just that, then i still know what he means. And if he has no idea what he meant and just blurred a bunch of incomplete thoughts together, then I sure hope that this was one of them. Anyway, fuck Neil Young really, what has he done for me lately (and by lately, I mean, like in the last 40 or so years)? But still do not fuck AM radio, because the last time I headed south on 35, there was a little local Honky Tonk/Western Swing station coming out of Weatherford that just totally kicked ass. It seemed to have a solid signal radius of at best 25 miles, so..got about half an hour of that before it started breaking up. But you get something like that by surprise on your AM car radio when out on the road, it's still one of the greater musical pleasures to be had outside of the house, I think. But also, one of the rarest. Didn't used to be that way, but...oh well.

Thanks! That's what I was wondering, exactly. Kind of a "revenge" album for the marketplace.

In the 50s, 60s, and early 70s?

Fun film in a lot of ways, not least of which in how it somewhat viciously skewers it's talking head sociologists and yet reaffirms their more basic premises.

Cool, AM Radio was in mono, and if you wanted to hear Coltrane on the radio, you'd have to live in an urban area. and maybe go to the FM band. Maybe, I thnk most jazz radio in America was AM, not sure, but pretty sure. That's not exactly the "it" I was talking about, but if you and Neil Young to go at it, be my guest..

Does the Fresh Sound "Lighthouse" thing collect all the known material from whatever it is that's being covered? Might be the same club/piano as the BN set, but definitely not the same recordist.

All right! Just found the missing link back to Mercury for the Trip LP: http://www.audiophileusa.com/item.cfm?record=95645

Of course not. Neil Young is the All-Time Global Spokesperson For Clear Headed Logical And Linear Thinking. But quite apart from that, yes, AM did its "it" better than streaming is doing its. For now. If not, nobody would be hand-writhing over the end of the music industry. It's not just a matter of having a captive audience, its a matter of branding them while you got 'em. AM, got it done. Streaming, still trying. And truthfully, in terms of "sound quality" being as much a subjective environmental as/instead of an objective metric (key point), if I'm in my car wanting to hear American Popular Music from between, say, 1947-1972 (approximately), and if I have the choice between 45s being played on clear AM signal and a streaming whatever, I'm probably going with the AM. Of course, I'm not going to get that choice, even if I did have a burning need for it. People who grew up starting out on FM Pop radio might not get it, as might not people who only heard Top 40 AM from a long enough distance to get all teh static and shit at unfortunate levels (but even at that, that's one of those things that you don't really know is a negative until you have a viable alternative...WLS coming out of Chicago into Texas at midnight sounded completely different than did WLS coming into Sterling, Illinois at 3 PM) and fair enough. But even at that, if you ever stumble into a joint that has an old jukebox with those bigass speakers, a collection of 45s, and the volume turned up loud, go ahead and indulge yourself in some of the best "bad" sound available.

Yeah, well, Neil Young carries on about a lot of things. I've long ago learned to hear the parts that make sense an ignore the rest. Kinda like those other old guys who go off on rants where they get a good starting point and then end up with foil hat stuff. And truthfully, I can see his point about AM sound quality if he's talking about what came out of the speakers relative to what the object of the game was. Pop music wasn't always - and isn't now - about "sound quality" as we came know it in the glory days of The Era Of Album Rock. It was about making an immediate impact, a visceral, glandular tingly impact. And AM radio playing records mastered for AM Radio being delivered by AM radio...people figured out how to make that shit WORK, ya' know? So, I'm thinking that's at least part of his starting point, in whatever parts of his brain he's still using. And if it's not, then, that's the point I'll make - that AM Radio delivered its content with a more successful collective impact of intent than do the current steaming models, and not the least of the reasons why was that the creators of the product figured out how to tailor its sound to perfectly the delivery mechanism. Random example - "California Dreaming" - that record on CD, of oldies FM or any other "superior" format (including LP), all nice and roomy and echo-y just....endless ceiling, you know? That shit came on a car radio, those ceilings weren't there, all the reverb had nowhere to go but back onto itself, all that overdubbing didn't grow the sound taller, it pushed it out harder. Buy an original 45 and play in on a not-great record player of the approximate era and then play a CD of it...there's a fundamental difference. That's not a value judgement either, because, you know, I've heard it all I care to hear it, and whatever. Just sayin', In a time where collective listening was more often a necessity of circumstance than an option of luxury, stuff like that should not be overlooked, and definitely not forgotten. People today thinking that Lowest Common Denominator Songwriting is how you get a lot of people on your hook, and they may be right, given the delivery mechanisms they've got to work with today, but there was a time...you made a good record (so many great records have been made of so many at-best mediocre songs), and then you get that record on the air to where mass number of peoples are guaranteed to hear it all at the same time, several times per day, in any number of different individual circumstances...that's just a different social/musical/industrial paradigm than the ones we've got today, Simply put - no streaming service today has the potential for immediate collective impact that that broadcast pop radio had. It's a different thing altogether. And my gut feeling is that the an element of nostalgia figures in to make a collective pleasure "sound better" in memory than does an individual one, especially if that pleasure is based around an experience designed to be a collective success (i.e. - sell them 45s!). All this may or may not have been rattling around in Neil Young's head before it came out as "sound quality". If it was, he can thank me at his leisure for for translating. And if it wasn't, well, ok, this is what he said triggered in me.

He was talking about sound quality. Not what was available on it. So you're telling me that the sound quality on AM radio was/is better than the sound quality of digital streaming?! No, I'm not telling you that, nor am I sure that the notoriously rambling Neil Young was trying to tell you that. The only point I got out of it was that AM (and all those other things) kicked streaming's ass about was the "common culture" thing, like how if 5000 people were listening to the same station, then 5000 people were all hearing the same songs at the same time. Or how with tapes, things were really "hands on" in the way they brought music to groups of people...but I have no feelings about tht, really. AM radio, yes, AM kicked streaming's ass in terms of building a common culture. When he went off into the business about "sound quality", I figured it was just another case of that guy starting off on a road and ending up in a tree, Sound quality of AM, though, I will say this - those 45s were usually mastered to sound good coming out of car speakers, jukebokes, cheapass home hifis, etc.I've yet to hear a "modern" presentation of that era's pop music that sounds like it did on 45. Not talking "bettter" here, just "the same as" in terms of the type of presence and impact. People talk about regretting getting rid of their old LPs and all that, when what they should be considering is do they regret getting rid of their 45s, because 45s sound even less like digital than do LPs. So if you want to "relive" the "sound of the times" without 45s, hey, good luck. 50 bajillion people "reliving" their memories of cheap AM car radios on high dollar digital audio systems, that's a joke.

Hey, before FM became a commercially popular medium, AM radio RULED. Damn near every kind of music that America was listening to was there (I'm old enough to remember FM being almost 100% Classical & Easy Listening, and they were on AM too), and regionality was a strength, not a weakness. And before everybody got all segmented and formatted and stuff, Top 40 RULED. Not a lot of depth but breadth out (or would that be across?) the ass. So, I get what Neil Young is saying about AM radio. The rest of it sounds like the ramblings of some wantonly frothing discombobulationary, but the part about AM radio, I get.

Do we tend to overlook Sun Ra as a pianist? I think we do.

I recommend McCann's Night Music album Les Is More. It's a collection of his own personal recordings, not all of them of his own performances, and it suggests that his ear was as perceptive as his eye.

We need to focus on empowering "know" as much as we do "no", perhaps even more. People need to know that what they think as giving somebody another chance may easily be seen as "coming back for more". People need to know that power is not an intrinsically benevolent force. People need to know that men and women do not always process sexual impulses in exactly the same way at exactly the same time. People need to know that just being in a position to have to say "no" is something that should be strategized beforehand, that trying to figure out what to do right when its happening already has you at a disadvantage. Men need to start realizing that trust is required from all people, and women need to start demanding that trust be earned. The way this society has functioned with males as providers and therefore protectors and therefore power-holders and women as givers and therefore targets and therefore vulnerable has become more (visibly) corrupt and broken, and perhaps most importantly, unsustainable, than ever, and must be addressed as forthrightly as possible. If we're going to keep populating the planet (or even if we aren't), we're going to need to have everybody on target to bring their A-Game at all times. I heard that 25% of the people who got this Pluto thing together - including some of the leads,were women, and that some asshole Brit scientist not too long ago made some ignunt ass crack about how working with women was a "problem" for him because of love and/or tears, and, you know, grow the fuck up asshole, EVOLVE..Smart, strong, powerful men and women should not pose a threat to each other, they should be welcome. It's the weak, the predatory and the people who accept their victim-hood as somehow "deserved" or "expected" that threaten us all. The people for whom things like power and pride are not accepted as something "they" should have in a healthy, balanced proportion within their personality. And I'm not talking about some kind of fucked up "survival of the strongest/destruction of the weak" kind of crypto-fascist thing, I'm just talking about everybody, from those who live out amongst nobody else to those who cannot find escape from anybody else, to start thinking in terms of the true and lasting gain that simple(?) values like honesty, trustworthiness, equal respect for others and self bring to all. The appeal is obvious, that's what people like Bill Cosby have sold so well, and that's why it really, really sucks to see how big a lie that was as he (likely) applied it to himself, in this one aspect of his life. Because, you know, most people do want to be good, they do want to do right. Not gonna happen all the time, obviously, but dammit, a young woman should be taught as a matter of course to have her eyes wide open at all times, and should not have ANY fear about dealing with any wrong that is attempted on her should that come to pass, nor for being ready to back it off when it starts to happen. And no man should ever be taught feel justified in perpetrating such an action, be it out of entitlement or expectation or whatever. We're not talking about castrating women and emasculated men, we're talking about desirable and necessary survival skill for a world going forth. Personal responsibility and honor, dammit, it's not necessarily an instinct. Educate, educate, EDUCATE. and if that sounds like Cliff Huxtable, ask yourself this - what do you think Cliff would have told Denise if she was thinking about going back to see Bill Cosby a second time? And to hit it even harder, what do you think CLAIRE would have said to Denise? Claire would have not been delicate about it, I'm pretty sure about that. Bill Cosby can go fuck himself. I'm still a fan of Cliff and Claire.

The bathrobe seems to be a constant. You ever notice how rich guys always seem to have bathrobes? And how people who flaunt their bathrobes always seem to be assholes? We can't save the whole world all at once, but can we at least look into banning bathrobes? They're creepier now more than ever. In the case of the CNN subject's account, the first time appears to have been a case of outright deceit on Cosby's part, and that's for sure rape by any standard. But the second time...she had already had something funny happen once, and the drugs were offered as a condition of entry into the room, it's still rape if the sex was not consensual, but c'mon people, somebody else's evil does not always excuse your own stupidity, fool me once, etc. Rape conviction for Cosby AND Stupidity conviction for 2nd time victim willing to take unknown drugs as a condition of man who already had been shady with her. Not "or", "AND".

That's good to know. Very adroit and sensitive player, and definitely overlooked.

There you go, ladies and gentlemen of the universe, Dan Gould representing America better to others than America represents itself to itself, friend of some, hero to all, gettin' it done in spite of itself, hello, Dan Gould, Jazz Record Hero!

Speaking of Billy...is Francesca Tanksley still around? She was a remarkably sympathetic pianst for Billy's music and had one really nice trio album of her own a while back. Have not heard much of her since, though, hope she is both alive and well.

Start here: Get 'em while they're still warm. If the inside of the plastic bag is steamy but not yet condensing, carpre freakin' diem.

They send the overseas shipments to Dan's house and he takes them to the Post Office when he feels like it. That's why it costs less.