Big Wheel

Seem quite logical to me -- why are you dubious? For a few reasons: -As Jim notes, not only does the tune not exactly sound like Hatikvah, it's not even really a minor blues as recorded by the nonet. -I know that Carisi was not Bird, but in general the beboppers were not so obviously referential like this when it came to current events. It's not like there were many tunes written about Truman or Roosevelt or the partition of India. And on Birth of the Cool, especially, the reference just seems a little out of place among the tunes that were performed. (To me it's potentially the same kind of error as assuming that "Moose the Mooche" was written as a reference to this famous drunk apple-stealing elk. Leaving aside the anachronism for a second, my point is that someone who knew nothing about Bird or bebop might think they were safe in guessing that world events had something to do with the title. But anyone who knows anything about Bird knows of course that his personal acquaintances figure in several of his titles.) -The exhibit that this was a part of seemed to be stretching things for some of the tunes that were presented as examples of the melding of black American and Jewish culture. The Cab Calloway Yiddish jive tunes definitely fit the bill...but they also included stuff like Grant Green's version of Shadrack from Feelin' the Spirit. To me it's pretty obvious that Green's interpretation of Shadrack has only the most tenuous of connections to Judiasm. While of course the Exodus story and other parts of the Old Testament had long been used as the religious background for the Civil Rights movement, that doesn't mean that there was anything consciously Jewish about their adoption, especially on an album devoted to jazz treatments of the gospel tradition. (If "Shadrack" counts as Jewish, you pretty much have to say that a full 25% of gospel music is Jewish.) So I had reason to be skeptical about the appropriateness of other tunes included as part of the exhibit.

Does anyone know the story behind the title to Carisi's "Israel"? I was at the SF Contemporary Jewish Museum today and they included the tune as part ofthis exhibit, claiming that the tune was written to pay tribute to the new Jewish state. If the tune was written around 1948, obviously that would be timely....but I am dubious. As far as I know Carisi was not himself Jewish, and there are any number of Israels he could have been referring to.

Argue himself doesn't use the single-word version consistently on his blog (yes, I checked using Google). I am left to conclude that Argue used "bigband" in a hurriedly typed email to Johnson without thinking much about it, and Johnson made a big deal out of it because...well, probably because he had nothing of substance to say.

But what do we mean by relevance? To the vast majority of Americans jazz was already irrelevant by 1980. Would it really be a stretch to say it was already irrelevant by about 1973? How relevant was it in 1968? Because most of the people connected with the radical/protest culture of that time don't seem to have been inspired by it nearly as much as other styles. The "heritage industry" transformation to me is more of a symptom than the cause.

Agreed. While I like Darcy James Argue's music very much I have a feeling he didn't have any idea what Johnson's real angle for this piece was going to be. Argue is basically saying that his music is political and topical, and that's fine. But that's very different from what Johnson is saying, which is that jazz has some special claim as protest music in 2011 that other styles do not have, while not bothering to support this point at all. Mostly it's just an incoherent mess though. How is Leo Smith's piece, which is an explicit commemoration of events that happened 50 years ago, supposed to any connection whatsoever to Occupy Wall Street?

Miles Davis: Complete In a Silent Way today at Pop Market. $26.99. This box (like the Cellar Door/On the Corner boxes) has always seemed overpriced compared to the older sets like Bitches Brew, but this is one of the better prices I've seen for it.

This is why I dig Jazz Standard despite the music shading toward too conservative for my tastes. At Iridium/Birdland/Blue Note I feel like I'm getting ripped off no matter how good the show is. Smoke is OK and the Vanguard is of course the Vanguard, but Jazz Standard was the first NYC club where I really felt like the management cared about making sure people enjoy themselves. There's a reason for this: The Jazz Standard and its affiliated restaurant Blue Smoke are part of the empire of Danny Meyer, whose other restaurants include Union Square Cafe, Gramarcy Tavern. 11 Madison Park among others. Meyer's ideas about hospitality that effectively revolutionized New York restaurants when he opened the Union Square Cafe in the 80s when he was in his late 20s. Huh, I had no idea. Thanks for the info! (And thank you, Mr. Meyer.)

You don't understand poseur or lack of chops? Zorn wouldn't know a change if it came up and slapped him in the ass! Listen to "Nicely" off the Sonny Clark tribute record (especially the double-time runs) and then tell us you don't think Zorn has chops or can play changes.

This is why I dig Jazz Standard despite the music shading toward too conservative for my tastes. At Iridium/Birdland/Blue Note I feel like I'm getting ripped off no matter how good the show is. Smoke is OK and the Vanguard is of course the Vanguard, but Jazz Standard was the first NYC club where I really felt like the management cared about making sure people enjoy themselves.

Can you confirm my belief that Griffin is playing alto on Wee?

I thought I would love this record and was surprised to find that I ended up liking Naked City much more on first listening. But definitely need to go back and listen to it again a few times.

It's like they're practically begging him to turn into this guy when he grows up:

Just listened to "Wee" on this one. Are my ears deceiving me or is Griffin playing alto on this track?! I know it was his first instrument but wow....it's scary how good he sounds on this.

spotify is now in the US as of this summer. still in limited beta though. the legacy records site delivered extra invites pretty speedily (a google search should turn it up) interesting...my initial understanding was that rdio was inferior in terms of selection (jazz and overall), but i may need to revisit that.

I can reliably inform everyone that this guy isn't any good. He couldn't even steal my chair in the high school big band when he was 16 and I was 18.* *joke, of course. Dude was purely a classical pianist and didn't try to start improvising until late that same year. He is now a beast and my main accomplishment is 2000 posts on some jazz chat board.

But that's exactly the problem - Schapp has an infinite number of interesting subjects he could be talking about when it comes to these obscure figures, and instead wastes 90% of his airtime with pointless minutia. What's the point of talking about this stuff at all if you focus on entirely the wrong things? Part of Schapp's problem, I think, is a form of Rock Critic Syndrome - as a non-musician he actually doesn't really understand the music as well as he would like to. To the average listener a lack of total understanding is OK because what they don't know is OK with them; they don't feel they need to know every single facet of what they are listening to. But because of his obsession, Schapp wants badly to get the music on every conceivable level, and so he overcompensates for this knowledge gap in painfully annoying ways.

Just listened to a slightly more polished version of this song on this Smithsonian Folkways release: http://www.folkways.si.edu/albumdetails.aspx?itemid=897 Are there many versions with alternate titles out there too? I know Sonny has said St. Thomas is based a traditional Virgin Islands melody, but I don't think I'd ever heard anyone name specific songs which use the melody.

I am far from an Apple fanboy, but it isn't really fair to say Jobs was fired for doing a bad job in the early '80s. Jobs may not have succeeded had he stayed, but he was reporting to a former Pepsi marketing executive who had little tech experience. Part of it was simply that what Jobs was doing was expensive and worried the bean counters-in other words, he was taking the kinds of risks that Google and many other tech companies now consider essential given the business they are in. And part of it was undoubtedly that you had two marketing geniuses running the place and they clashed on lots of marketing stuff. John Sculley certainly didn't get it either-if he had we'd expect that Apple would have turned around quickly after Jobs's departure. Instead the company spent a decade in the wilderness. I agree that Woz doesn't get nearly enough credit for what he did and that Jobs's talents were mostly on the design and marketing sides of the business. Unfortunately we live in a culture where the unassuming nerd usually loses out to the charismatic type A guy when it comes to these kinds of things.

A quality control question: I'm listening to the Golson/Farmer on Spotify right now and there is some kind of digital artifact that has ruined some of the tracks. Specifically, the sound I'm talking about starts at around 3:00 of "Little Karin" and continues all the way through the end of the set. (Anyone else with Spotify hear this, or do just I need to restart something?) Does anyone with the eMusic versions hear what I'm talking about, as well?

Sorry, but that's BS. Breaking contracts by both sides is a standard part of the business of football. NFL contracts are non-guaranteed and the management releases players early all the time while exercising various parts of the contract that allow them to not have to pay the full value of the deal. If an NFL contract were considered an unbreakable commitment, you'd see constant litigation to resolve issues with the terms not being followed to the letter. If the teams don't care enough to sue players, I don't see why I should consider a player who uses leverage with his contract to be breaking some code of honor. Business is business.

It's not exactly a surprise that the wealthiest cities in the country charge higher nominal prices for tickets. Much more interesting is to see stats that show the ratio of ticket prices to broader economic measures (the one analysis I've seen on this looked at cost of living and unemployment rate). Those stats show what I've long suspected: Miami sports teams are the ones truly taking advantage of their fan base, even raising ticket prices in the middle of what was a very deep local recession.

I think Jim's perspective isn't that "labor" per se is to be resented here, but rather the market itself - that regardless of what prices dictate it's simply unseemly to have this kind of situation come about. I sympathize with this framing a little bit (I hate the fact that concert tickets to any big name are usually $100+, even though it's because people are willing to pay through the nose to see these bands), but don't see any feasible way out of it that doesn't make things worse (richer gazillionaire owners and so forth). Obviously it's also easier to notice when the "labor" is very prominent/concentrated like in sports. Whereas nobody makes a big deal, of course, when Company A sells a new giant widget-making machine to Company B for $100 million and most of the profit from the transaction goes to some hedge fund bigwig who invested in Company A. (Instead of, say, paying Company A's workers more or making widgets much cheaper for consumers to buy.)

Care to share some examples? People believe different things. Saying when you think someone's opinion is ill-considered or ridiculous doesn't make you "intolerant." Sorry if you feel like this is a personal slam - it isn't, believe me, it's just that the whole trope of claiming "the mere fact that I have different opinions means they must be defensible, and your making fun of my ideas shows that you're intolerant" is really tiresome at this point and is the most common BS line used by the board's resident political reactionary to justify all kinds of garbage. If anything, the intolerance is stronger on the part of the one claiming others are being intolerant: there are implicit claims in this whole line of thinking that 1) their ideas should not be subject to critical scrutiny, 2) decrying "disunity" basically amounts to saying "I'm right and you should uncritically embrace my correct position because not doing so means we aren't unified." Not a very generous attitude if you ask me. Perhaps a thicker skin is in order?

Not really. If there were really a net shift to light beers what you'd see is that light beer sales would be increasing. Instead they're merely not decreasing. Some people may be switching from crap regular beer to crap light beer, but if that's the case roughly as many are also switching from crap light beer to imports/craft beer.

Old Milwaukee is the flagship of the high-end products made by faltering Pabst Brewing Company I like PBR as much as the next hipster, but if Old Milwaukee is at the high end, please don't tell me what Pabst's low-end products are. The article itself explains why this is happening: the beers are just as shitty as they've always been, but America is finally waking up to craft beer. Decent, widely available American beer - one more thing America should thank Jimmy Carter for!