JSngry

7 AM? Seriously, if it goes 6, that'll be as far as it goes. Dallas might lose focus a game or two as they did against Phoenix & San Antonio. But honestly, other than Jet they looked pretty unfocused offensively last night and still won by 10. Thank you, Jet. 5 is my best hunch, and a sweep is not impossible. It is unlikely, though. Mavs are going to have to fight like hell every game, but really, the team is too deep, too fast, too focused, and too hypnotized by Avery to lose a best-of-7 to Miami unless there's a critical injury involved. Shaq, gotta love him. D-Wade, gonna be one of the all-time greats, and seems like a great human as well. But beyond that, there ain't a lot there, not in comparison to Dallas. Nothing personal, and no gloating or trash-talking intended. But this edition of the Mavericks is one helluva team, and it's a team whose time has come.

Beaucoup!

http://www.m-base.com/ The earlier M-Base recordings show a concept being developed, and are opften more fun to think about than to listen to. These later ones show the concept fully matured and internalized, and they're powerful, provocative music. When I talk about the relative handful of "jazz musicians" making relevant music of the now, Steve Coleman is definitely included.

Yeah, Delicious Poison has proven for me to be very much the "stealth" record of the bunch. Dug it ok at first, but it just keeps getting better with every listen... I'm also just now beginning to realize how much "different, and yet stylistically joined by her talent" also describes her vocals. She doesn't have just one voice, she's got a variety of voices, and the way that she varies them from song to song (and within each song) is pretty amazing. And I'd be hard pressed to name anybody in opo who creates contrapuntal background vocals any better or more diversified, and only a handfull who've done so as well as she has. And it's usually all her, overdubbed, and ina variety of voices, both lead and background. After a while, the sheer cumulativeness of her talent hits you (or it did me, anyway) like the proverbial ton of bricks. All these great songs, all these great productions, all these great vocals, and it's all her. The productions aren't (almost) exclusively hers until after 1999 or so, but that was seven years ago, and she did do her fair share of self-production prior to that. It's not like this is just a good singer who gets lots of outside help to make it sound good, or just a great songwriter who depends on somebody else to produce her, or just a gifted producer who needs outside songwriting/singing talent to realize their vision. No, she's all of that her ownself. And its not like there's just one song or one album that "captures her essence" or something like that. They all capture quite nicely the essence of whatever it is they're doing, but each one is, like you said, Lon, different. 4 Seasons is a self-contained masterpiece, but so is Optimista, and so is Episodes In Color. So are almost all of them, and they are all diffeernt yet they are all from the same place. Hers is a subtle talent, to be sure. But it is also a massive one.

I don't detect any enthusiasm behind those sentences. Perhaps none was intended. No enthusiasm, but no disgust either. She does what she does more interestingly than the bulk of her peers, and it's not without some musical interest in/on those terms. Are there other people I'd rather hear, especially on BN? Sure. But does her signing to the label make me cringe the way that the signing of, say, Michelle Shocked would? No way. Really, I think we all better get used to this type thing. The market for "real jazz" is not enough for a corporate label to get by on, even when all the (imo) "faux real jazz" and the market for it is factored in. So a corporate jazz label is going to have to come up with some kind of angle to sell product, and if that angle is "interesting alternative pop made by and for an over-35-ish audience", hey - that's what they gotta do. It's funny, really, how the signings at BN parallel the decline and eventual elimination of "real jazz" at the local NPR station about 20 years ago. Over the space of a few years, that station went from having jazz 6 nights a week to having the music programming become "eclectic" (which meant more and more artists like Vega, The Neville Brothers, Laurie Anderson, etc. and less and less jazz of any sort). Listenership increased for a while, but eventually the staion went to a predominately news/talk format. When BN starts releasing CDs of Diane Rehm, then I'll know it's really all over. Until then, hey - the number of people making really interesting "jazz of the now" is depressingly small anyway (and often enough isn't even considered jazz by the Jazz Police). Keep the reissues coming for those of us who still want/need to hear the stuff played the way it the way it was meant to be played, let the indies give us the worthy stuff of the new, and let the corpolabels give us interesting (enough) pop music with at least some tangental relation to jazz, either in musical influence or attitudinal sympathy. I'd rather hear a good, interesting pop record that challenges the conventions of its genre than a tired jazz retread that seeks comfort in same any day of the week. Especially Monday!

A total burner.

And that's the problem right there - too many people don't dance no more. Don't matter if it's King Oliver or AEC - DANCE TO THE SHIT! And if the dance ain't in you, youmaybe got a problem. This I do believe.

40 years and you've never seen joy in a Braxton fan? Dude, you ain't seen joy 'til you've seen me dancing to Braxton!

Mavs in no more than 6, but it'll be a helluva lot more work than the local fans are expecting...

And yet Monday Michiru (who smokes all their asses - as well as those of most of today's "jazz artists") hasn't got a deal. The ignorance spawned by the cycles of endless inbreeding. Gotta love it!

Hey, most jazz isn't jazz anymore either. The "suits" will be in their element!

Unless you read the inter-testamental literature that survives, especially The Book of Enoch. That literature, and that book in particular (perhaps the defining work for setting the stage of the millieu in which Jesus stepped up to the plate, so to speak), gives a very good picture of how things evolved in the Jewish community both socially and spiritually, and why everybody was so hot for a Messiah to appear. Traditional Christianity tends to teach that the Jews of the time were merely looking for an "earthly king". Well, hey, it was a lot more that that in some circles. Let's just say that the Apocalyptic fervor that grips the most extreme of today's zealots of all faiths ain't nothing new... This is the stuff that "official" Christianity doesn't encourage their people to read (excepting the Catholic church's inclusion of a few of these writings in The Apocrypha), and the stuff that it seems that a lot of Jews regard as totally irrelevant to the events described in the first three Gospels. But in my opinion, it's essential to an understanding of it all, regardless of one's personal beliefs. We tend to think of the OT as "Point A" and the NT as "Point B". But in reality, the NT is "Point C". A lot of things happened between the end of the OT and the beginning of the NT. A lot. The various inter-testamental writings are the true "Point B". They're not going to be of interest to anybody whose beliefs are set-in-stone dogmatic, but for anybody with an open mind and an intellectual curiosity (regardless of their faith or lack thereof), they make for some illuminating and fascinating reading.

Again - look to the Essenes. Lon's done a lot more research into these type things than I have, and we have somewaht different conclusions, but I think that we can both agree that an understanding of what was going on in the Essene community around the time of Jesus' reported life is crucial to an understanding of the general climate that resulted in the earliest birthings of Christianity. It was a turbulent time, they were some turbulent people, and what they and many of the very earliest Christians (who may very well have been looking at it all as a new form of Judaism) were all about probably has little if anything to do with post-Pauline Christianity. Between Paul, Constantine, I feel safe in saying that doctrinal "Christianity" as it has come to exist is based on the historical Jesus in much the same way that Presidents Day sales are based on George Washington & Abraham Lincoln. You can get some great deals, and it keeps the name and ideals in the public eye, but...

Again, I suggest you read Theiring. These conflicting geneologies have "Essene" written all over them. You really should read Theiring, unless you're dead-stuck on the notion that "Jesus" never existed in any form. And if that's the case, this is nothing more than a parlor game. And you can do better than that.

Suzanne Vega is a not uninteresting talent. Rooster's point is a good one though - if they were signing artists like this to "subsidize" their less profitable yet worthy (or more) acts, I'd be a lot happier. Still, Suzanne Vega is a not uninteresting talent.

The "claims" of Jesus about himself, as opposed to his teachings about the nature of the spiritual life, are few and far between, actually. Is Jesus himself ever quoted in the Bible as making such a claim?

Well, yeah, sure, some, but.... You'd be surprised how many "real" Christians have reached similar conclusions. And there's suggestion that many early Christians were of a similar bent. So it's not a new notion by any means. It's just one that was not codified during the corporate takeover back in the day. Again, oh well... I'm a bit rusty on this, but I believe that there's two geneologies of Jesus in the Bible, and there are subtle discrepancies between the two. There's a possibility that this is related to some kind of conflict within the Essene community. The role the Essenes played in the life of Jesus is certainly an unprovable point of contention in some circles, but the writings of Barbara Theiring (which I've recommended to Alexander before) are certainly worthy of review and consideration regardless of the final conclusion one reaches after same.

Lon's got the maternal geneology angle right, but that still leaves the issue of paternity wide open. My church(es) - I've been both Lutheran & Methodist in my church-belonging life - don't really deal with it, which is why I'm kinda like yeah, ok, whatever when i come to that kind of trip. The answer I formulated for myself a long time aqo is a simple one - we're all children of god. Whether you regard "god" as a specific being or a general abstract representation of the unifying life-force that runs throughout creation, we all come from it. Therefore, yeah, Jesus is the son of god. But so am I, and so are you. The Biblical Jesus came into a specific geo-political dynamic, and his story as related in the Bible is definitely told through that lens. The "messiah" thing is all about that. People were waiting at the time, people were waiting in the aftermath, ande some people are still waiting. And these are the people who told (and still tell) the story. Jesus came, dropped some science, and then split. He didn't leave any memoirs. So, really, the NT is an interpretation, not a history. I take it as such, even though that's sort of a "non-traditional" form of Christianity. Oh well...

That sounds plausible, reasonable, and fair. But the wording seems to leave open some potentially unsavory loopholes, no?

You Bastards! You Guys Y'all

http://the-light.com/mens/samson/4/samson.html

Received via layers of forwarded (I know who Billy Bragg is, but can honestly say that I've never knowingly heard his work) e-mail:

Begpardon?

Morrow Cronkite Rather

Lame.