Face of the Bass

Thanks for the responses. I'm leaning towards getting a new dedicated CD player--one disc only. Looking for value for money...I like good sound but I'm not able to spend $1,000 for a CD player when I can get something that will work well for a fraction of the cost. Any recommendations would be warmly appreciated.

No, CDs don't skip on my computer, and indeed, my DVD player does not skip either. I don't really want to go to a streaming setup, as I really like being able to play the physical objects...

The CD player is on the upper shelf of a home entertainment system that is sitting on the carpet in my living room. There are certain spots on the floor that if you step on them too forcefully, the player will skip. I had the player on the lower shelf earlier but it was skipping then, which caused me to try the upper shelf. I added the tennis balls (four halves in total, one for each corner) last week and it doesn't seem to have made much of an improvement. I think I'd be fine with buying a new CD player but I want to be sure that a newer one would actually fix the problem. I don't even really need a five-disc changer, I'd just buy a regular single disc player if I knew it would work fine. Has the technology advanced enough so that this would not even be an issue with a new player?

So, my stereo is set up in an area where my children--a 7 year old girl and 2 year old boy--sometimes can be seen running about, back and forth. When they hit certain spots on my floor, it can cause any CD that is playing to skip, enough to the point where it becomes annoying. My CD player is pretty old...a 5-disc RCA that I bought about nine years ago. I read somewhere that tennis balls cut in half could fix this sort of thing. I did that but it seemed to have little to no effect. Is there something else I can do to try to limit vibration, or would a newer model of CD player fare better with this sort of thing?

I'm sorry, but I did not read that note as excusing what happened. I think it had more to do with what is happening RIGHT NOW, and whether he is "okay," health-wise, right now. There are some of us who still care about such things. Not everyone in the world looks to throw somebody in the trash when they do something horrible.

Anyone into experimental music should jump on the Rowe on Erstwhile, A View from the Window. Great recording at a bargain price.

I want both of these. I pay you money. You give to me.

Inspired at least in part by this topic, over a week ago I started up a new blog, that is at least tangentially dedicated to writings on the music, life, and philosophy of Sun Ra, though as it develops I find ways to include other dimensions of my thoughts as well. Anyway, for those who are interested, you can check it out at http://otherplanesofthere.blogspot.com Thanks!

Up...price reduction on the two box sets and have added five discs: Lateef's Psychicemotus, Carter's Further Definitions, Jacquet's Desert Winds, Mengelberg's The Root of the Problem and Koglmann's L'Heure Bleue.

I felt it up here in Albany, NY. I was sitting at my computer when everything started gently shaking for about 15-20 seconds.

I have the following for sale. All listed prices include shipping to the U.S. Please inquire for international deliveries. Paypal Only. Thanks for looking! Jazz CDs: Stan Adler/Paul Chauncy/Jon Lloyd/Rob Palmer/Phil Wachsmann - Apparitions (Leo) $5 Anouar Brahem - Thimar (ECM) $5 Richard Carr/Mike Nord/Georg Hofmann/Art Maddox/Randy Kem - In Walks Art (Leo) $5 Ellery Eskelin - Ten (hatOLOGY) $8 Ellery Eskelin - Vanishing Point (hatOLOGY) $15 Ellery Eskelin - Forms (hatOLOGY) $8 Hermet Geerken/John Tchicai/Famoudou Don Moye - Cassava Balls (still sealed) (Leo) $5 Eric Harland - Voyager--Live by Night (Space Time) $7 Illinois Jacquet with Kenny Burrell - Desert Winds (Verve) $5 Franz Koglmann - L'Heure Bleue (hatOLOGY) $8 Yusef Lateef - Psychicemotus (Impulse!) $7 Misha Mengelberg - The Root of the Problem (hatOLOGY) $8 Wes Montgomery - Goin' Out Of My Head (Verve) $5 Richard Nunns/Evan Parker - Rangirua (Leo) $5 Evan Parker/Phil Wachsmann/Teppo Hauta-aho - The Needles (Leo) $7 Tim Trevor-Briscoe/Nicola Guazzaloca - One Hot Afternoon (Leo) $5 Weather Report - Mysterious Traveller (Columbia) $5 Cassandra Wilson - Belly of the Sun (Blue Note) $5 Experimental Music CDs Joe Colley - Psychic Stress Soundtracks (Antifrost) $5 Joe Colley - Desperate Attempts at Beauty (Ground Fault) $5 EKG & Giuseppi Ielasi - Group (Formed) $5 Ferran Fages/Alfredo Costa Monteiro/Ruth Barberan - Istmo (Creative Sources) $5 Los Glissandos - Stand Clear (Creative Sources) $5 Lapslap - Scratch (Leo) $5 Alfredo Costa Monteiro - Rumeur (Creative Sources) $5 Julien Ottavi - Nervure Magnetique (Sigma) $5 Dion Workman - Ching (Antiopic) $5

Good afternoon everyone... I have the following box sets for sale. Prices include shipping to the U.S. Please inquire for international deliveries. Wes Montgomery - Complete Riverside Recordings, $125 (Discs, box, and booklet all in like-new condition) Clifford Brown - The Complete Emarcy Recordings, $135 (See above. Discs, box, and booklet all in like-new condition) ON HOLD Modern Jazz Quartet - The Complete Atlantic Studio Recordings of the Modern Jazz Quartet, $90 (Discs, box, and booklet all in like-new condition) ON HOLD Paypal only, please. These will ship no earlier than this Thursday. Thanks!

Right! But if I'm going to go, I want to go at least touting some good music.

Inspired from an exchange in another thread, I think it would be revealing for posters here to do the following exercise: You are sitting in your living room with your best friend in the entire world. A large man breaks in your front door, marches into your living room, pulls out a gun, and then asks the following question: "If you could only save all the recordings of ONE artist in your jazz collection, which artist would you save?" Taken aback by the shocking crudity of this question, you say, "Of course, that is an impossible question. I could no sooner choose one artist's recordings over another than I could choose one child over..." Before you are able to get out another word, the man walks over to your best friend, puts the gun to his head, and pulls the trigger. Your friend's brains are splattered all over your carpet, all over your couch, all over the walls. Now he puts the gun to YOUR head. "Which artist?" he shouts. As you shake with fear and struggle to maintain control over your bodily functions, you give your answer. What is your answer? If you could only save all the recordings of one artist in your collection, with all your other recordings being taken away from you forever, which body of work would you save first? I would save the following artists, in the order listed: 1. Miles Davis 2. Sun Ra 3. John Coltrane 4. Ornette Coleman 5. Cecil Taylor 6. Charlie Parker 7. Steve Lacy 8. Thelonious Monk 9. Anthony Braxton 10. Pharoah Sanders If he denied me any of those ten, I'd tell him to just go ahead and pull the trigger.

That's one possible outcome, although my experience with child abuse also has taught me that it can have the opposite effect, that the abused person grows up and vows to never allow anything like that to happen to anyone that they love. Victims of child abuse can become hyper-vigilant about any form of abuse ever happening to their own children, or to other children they know.

Has anyone here seen Pasolini's brilliant and horrifying film, Salo? This case is starting to remind me of that. And yet...I think these people, if they did what is being alleged, are very sick. It must be a terrible and dark compulsion that would cause someone to do these things, and I do know that in some cases, pedophiles feel relieved when they are caught, because they won't have to hide in shame anymore...their wrongdoings are exposed in the light of day. In one of the links to the Wikipedia article there was a story about a HS football coach in Virginia caught up in this thing who seemed to in some ways have been unburdened by his arrest. Now people know the truth, and there is nowhere left to hide. All the aliases, the secret encryptions, it's all falling apart now.

I'd like to think that they're monstrous human beings. It's not like being a human being and being really dangerous and fucked up aren't mutually exclusive qualities. OTOH, if we could round up all the monsters in the world (except the cute ones like Cookie Monster) and execute them at one place and at one time, that would pretty much fix everything, wouldn't it... Unfortunately I think if we did that we'd have to execute ourselves, because we would have become monsters...

I have it and I like it, but I actually prefer some of the material from the later 60s and early 70s, definitely including the Moog stuff. I love your list. It wouldn't be my list, but everyone should do one to get their bearings (would make a fun thread). Mine would not even include Sun Ra. Just off the top of my head: John Coltrane Steve Lacy Anthony Braxton Cecil Taylor Evan Parker Miles Davis Peter Brotzmann John Butcher Charlie Parker Art Ensemble/Roscoe Mitchell On any given day, the order might get reshuffled a bit, but it would be a while before we reached Sun Ra. As for the claims of prophet etc, I just don't buy that. There are some very interesting socio-political aspects to Sun Ra, but I think that aspect has been oversold. Nice list! When I made up mine, I kept changing it to get Steve Lacy higher and higher...I suspect in another month he will be higher than I have him listed. A number of other ones you listed here, particularly Brotzmann, Art Ensemble, and Evan Parker, would be close to making my list and might make it some days depending on my mood.

Maybe it is my ingrained prejudice against 80s music in general. I've never really tried to hear Miles's music from the 80s either, except for Aura. The few 80s discs of Sun Ra's that I have--At the Village Vanguard, for instance, which might actually be from the 1990s--were relatively disappointing to me when I first heard them, but that was now several years ago.

That's good stuff, Allen. I think that 1950s stuff ages really well...actually, all of Sun Ra's stuff from the late 1950s through the mid-to-late 1960s ages well. I don't think the band was ever quite the same after Ronnie Boykins left, but there are some good albums from the 1970s too. (I've never really been able to get into his 80's material, though.) Anyway, there is no doubt that there is a glut of Sun Ra recordings out there, but the man was an absolutely brilliant musician, composer and bandleader. In terms of critical recognition, he might be the most underrated American musician of the twentieth century. For those interested, I think Szwed's biography of Ra ranks as one of the best jazz bios ever written, IMO.

I'll put it this way: if somebody burst into my house, put a gun to my head and said that I had to get rid of every recording that I had by every artist, except one, I would save my collection in this order: 1. Miles Davis 2. Sun Ra 3. John Coltrane 4. Ornette Coleman 5. Cecil Taylor 6. Charlie Parker 7. Steve Lacy 8. Thelonious Monk 9. Anthony Braxton 10. Pharoah Sanders 11. Charles Mingus 12. Duke Ellington And so forth. Dude could have my Louis Armstrong recordings, as I've sold most of those anyway after an aborted attempt to make myself like something that I just wasn't digging. I keep the Hot Five & Sevens around out of a sense of obligation more than anything else. Everything else has been listened to and then resold.

I studied poetry throughout college, and was blessed to have a wonderful, encouraging mentor in the poet Jane Shore. Then I went to NYU and Levine was the exact opposite of that, and suddenly, without any encouragement or helpfulness, I realized I didn't really want to be a poet. I wanted to be a writer, but I wanted to work in history, so that's what I did. So in a way I am grateful that my encounters with Levine convinced me to give it up, as there is far too much "navel gazing" going on in poetry for my tastes anyway. Levine's self-styled everyman persona is a joke, though. Butchers and factory workers aren't the ones reading his poetry or giving him prizes. It's the "ivory tower" academics that he is so disdainful towards that have nurtured and advanced his career.

To my ears he and Ellington produced the best big band music in jazz history. I think his Afro-futurist musings and costumes have caused many to dismiss him as a clown, but I stand by what I said. His music holds up as well as (and often better than) all the people I mentioned above. Further, his influence on the avant garde scene is considerable, to say the least.

Nice!

Sorry, I can't help myself...I took a class with Levine at NYU in 1999, as part of the MFA program there, and I really didn't like him at all. He was always putting people down, whether it be students or other famous poets, while projecting this image of himself as the tough everyman of American poetry. I was not a great poet, but he convinced me to give up on it altogether, and to pursue something else with my life (which I'm very glad I did, so I guess I can be thankful for that.) To me he was just an arrogant s.o.b., and I see that in an interview with the Times he talks about how he thinks the Library of Congress has named a number of really mediocre poets as the Poets Laureate. Well, as far as I'm concerned he can add his name to his own list of poets undeserving of the honor. Really didn't want to crap on this thread, but my experiences working with this man were so negative that I just have to take the opportunity to rag on him at least a little bit.