Big Wheel

It might, but if they continue to charge your credit card at the time of order placement, rather than at time of shipment, I'm out. It doesn't look like it...I just put an item in my cart and clicked "checkout". Was routed directly to Amazon. Not sure of the specific way they've integrated with Amazon, but if I had to guess, it's Amazon that's charging your card and doing things the way Amazon always does it.

FWIW, Tower.com has a new CEO and he posted a letter on their site saying he knows a lot of customers are unhappy and he's trying to turn things around. I dunno if that's real, honest contrition or just a slick attempt at PR, but there you go. Tower is also moving to migrating all their order fulfillment and customer service to Amazon, so maybe that will improve things?

Interesting! If everything went up in smoke, at least I have a list of all my CDs (about half of yours), which would help prove their former existence. Fortunately, I've no experience of loss or claims of this sort. As for burglary, who'd want the stuff? Have to be a pretty cool burglar! I once left a bag of about a dozen jazz LPs (Blue Note, Riverside, etc) on a train which traveled a hundred miles to its terminus, where someone handed it in intact. As they say, you couldn't give it away! Don't be too surprised. Years ago when I was gradually moving in with my girlfriend (now wife), our apartment was burglarized. The only things stolen were my NAD integrated amplifier, a CD player and about 100 of my CDs (somehow the two TVs and other electronics and all of my wife's jewelry were untouched). Luckily, I had not yet formally moved in and the vast majority of my collection was still at my former apartment. I doubt the person (I had my suspicions regarding a possible cuplrit) had even the slightest interest in the music and instead was just looking for something to grab quick and possibly sell some place else. I have also had the misfortune of having a significant number of CD booklets and LP covers damaged in a flood that occurred shortly after we moved in to our current home. Now that hurts to this day every time I look at all the CDs and LPs on spindles and in sleeves that I had to toss the covers for because of water damage. The flood was nearly five years ago and I still have not had the strength to go into one or two boxes of CDs that were also damaged - booklets still stuck to discs. Give it a shot if you can. I bought a copy of Miles in Berlin from J&R 5 years ago and got caught in a downpour that soaked it and did the same thing. Tons of wet paper stuck to the disc. Last year I looked forlornly at it sitting there on the shelf, and said "what the hell, it barely cost anything and it probably won't screw up my computer, let's give it a shot." It ripped flawlessly to my hard drive.

J&R is currently having a sale of $4.99 CDs. Shipping from them always seems higher than it needs to be, plus most of the titles are in the discounted Columbia/Legacy line, so they can already be found in a lot of places in the $6.99 range. Still not a bad deal though.

I suspect that the Amazon mp3 store is actually a separate corporate ownership, perhaps part-owned by Amazon. Would love to know the details. I don't think this is the case (when you buy mp3s from Amazon, does your credit card statement list anything different than a typical Amazon purchase, especially something like a different merchant ID number?) BUT it's certainly possible that Amazon bought the technology to help them distribute and sell mp3s from another company, or acquired that company outright and integrated their technology into Amazon. When you buy rather than build in-house, integrating your old products with the new system is rarely a seamless affair.

My hunch is that Amazon's systems are significantly, uh, "jankier" than they often seem. While most of the site's features work well enough, there are occasionally things that make me wonder if its overall design on the backend impedes building "commonsense" features, like combining Marketplace items from the same seller into a single order.* As an example of a product hole I noticed...the Amazon mp3 store seems to have been oddly "bolted on" to the rest of the site. As a consumer, it seems rather silly that you'd need separate sections of "Your Account" to view regular orders and "digital orders," yet that's how Amazon built it, which suggests to me that the two types of orders use a common frontend but likely totally separate billing processes, databases, and so forth. I downloaded $4 in mp3s last month from the mp3 store but forgot that I hadn't updated the credit card used to pay. With regular orders, they just make you re-order the item again, and start processing the new order once your card goes through. But with mp3s, the music hits your hard drive well before your charges can be processed on your card. The regular billing workflow breaks down when you apply it to buying mp3s and Kindle books and stuff, but Amazon hasn't gotten around to fully patching this flaw by creating a new flow in the part of their mp3 system that handles billing. So my card declined and I got this meaningless message from Amazon to "re-enter your card to complete your order," but I already had the music of course. Don't even get me started on my attempt to get Amazon's support team to re-charge my card for the declined amount. *Or it also could simply be that it's not in Marketplace sellers' interests to allow customers to combine orders (less markup on the inflated shipping charges), so Amazon just doesn't do it.

Big Waldron post recently from Ethan Iverson at Do the Math, btw.

Huh, didn't remember seeing this session in Noal Cohen's Perkins discography, but indeed, there it is. For other obscure Perkins, I seem to remember liking that GNP date with Frank Morgan and Wardell Gray quite a bit.

As for which version of the chord you should play, it totally depends on the context. If the chord is functioning as a II7 chord (which often resolves to a ii7 chord a la bars 4-5 of "Take the A Train), then it's fine to use a version with the natural 5th in it. If the chord functions more as a V7 chord or an altered dominant, you might not want to play the natural 5th and instead leave things more ambiguous with C E F# Bb. Obviously the melody matters as well - if you see C7b5 notated and the melody emphasizes the +5/b13, then you probably want to stay away from putting a G natural in the voicing. (Assuming you're trying to avoid strong dissonances here.) Edit to say, in the Aebersold books C7+4 always means Lydian dominant and I think Cmaj7+4 (I can't type a triangle here the way Aebersold does for major 7th chords) always means Lydian. I think he even puts this explicitly in writing at some point in most of the books. So if you see a C7+4 in that context you can almost always voice it as a C13#11 (C E G Bb D F# A). Somewhere in the books Aebersold explains that all his chord symbols are simplified for easier reading but actually always translate to specific scales, any of whose extensions can be used in the voicing. To Aebersold, a C7b9 ALWAYS implies a diminished scale (C7 b9 #9 #11 natural 5th and 13th) and a C7+9 ALWAYS implies a diminished/whole-tone scale (C7 b9 #9 #11 b13 with no natural 5th). Obviously in the real world when playing standards, you can take broad liberties and don't have to hold to all the extensions Aebersold specifies.

I don't actually have an ebay account but it sounds like this could be a legitimate tool used by bigger sellers. It's possible this seller just goofed and pasted this link in by accident (I can see a bigger seller using it frequently, and misusing Turbo Lister could also be responsible for the multiple postings). But given the amount of crooks determined to use ebay and other large sites for phishing purposes, I wouldn't take my chances that this was just a novice seller who screwed a bunch of things up in the listing process. In general when I see something that looks out of place on a site that contains links from elsewhere (this includes search engines and their sponsored links, too) my first two assumptions are always (in this order): 1. Fraud 2. A bug in the site

Are you SURE that "legit-looking" ebay page prompting you for your user ID and password was really legit? This sounds to me like a classic case of phishing with a well-done fake of a real ebay login page. Although you thankfully stopped short of giving the site your password, if I were you I'd change your password anyway ASAP and scan your computer for malware.

I was thinking about a Muhal box too...but Muhal recorded a lot more for BS/SN than Haden et al. Maybe two Muhal boxes?

And they ship to the US, so at current exchange rates + ~$5 for shipping, that comes out to under $45 per set. Now that's more like it!

Jazzloft advertised these today in their regular email blast. The 7-disc sets are $60, the 6-disc ones are $55, and the 5-disc ones are $50. Not quite the deal I was hoping for, but still significantly cheaper than the typical BS/SN prices of at least $15 a disc.

This is currently very hard to find. Really? Amazon currently sells it along with 9 other sellers in the Amazon marketplace.

Not a typo, likely an algorithm failure. Notice that the other seller in the marketplace is offering the same title for 112.94. Subtract 1% from that price and you end up with...exactly the price Newbury is asking. So it looks like for a lot of titles they set their system to take 1% off the lowest seller's price, no matter what it is.

But that's mainly because the orthodox jazz education system barely existed at the time Hamilton was coming up (there was the North Texas program around that time, but not much else was in anything more than nascent stages). I wasn't saying that Hamilton and Alexander are themselves products of this system (though Alexander definitely is), but that the system actively encourages people in this style (more similar to Alexander's, less so to Hamilton's). I mainly included Hamilton because I think the system's orthodoxies are heavily biased toward inside playing at the expense of teaching more adventurous ways of approaching the music. Not so -- Berklee (for one) was going like gangbusters back then; though you're right that Hamilton was not a product of the orthodox jazz educational system. Also, when I was at Downbeat magazine back in 1968-9, the jazz education movement was something we regularly took account of editorially because the so-called "stage band" thing was getting big in high schools and colleges -- U. of Indiana under David Baker, U. of Illinois under John Garvey (not that those two were "stage bands" per se), etc., etc. -- and that movement meant big sales for the musical instrument companies that advertised in DB. I forgot about Berklee - I was mainly thinking about the elite programs today that didn't exist back then AFAIK (Manhattan, Mannes (began in 1986), NEC, Miami, Juilliard (which had no jazz until around 2000), William Paterson etc.). How long had Baker been at Indiana in 1968? My point is that though the movement existed, it didn't really have anywhere near the monolithic influence that it does today. Even by the 1970s, going to college for jazz was pretty much optional in terms of having a successful career, whereas these days it's considered a fixture of how young players learn to play.

But that's mainly because the orthodox jazz education system barely existed at the time Hamilton was coming up (there was the North Texas program around that time, but not much else was in anything more than nascent stages). I wasn't saying that Hamilton and Alexander are themselves products of this system (though Alexander definitely is), but that the system actively encourages people in this style (more similar to Alexander's, less so to Hamilton's). I mainly included Hamilton because I think the system's orthodoxies are heavily biased toward inside playing at the expense of teaching more adventurous ways of approaching the music.

The thing is, this cuts both ways. One point I was trying to make upthread is that the main reason there's so much music these days that sounds like Eric Alexander and Scott Hamilton is that there's a culture of orthodox jazz education that itself plays favorites and puts so much emphasis on bebop. I have no problem with listeners enjoying neo-traditionalists. But as a musician with an interest in seeing innovative music getting made, I'm also going to encourage peers to turn away from copying their example.

Chico O'Farrill's Heart of a Legend is $1.99. Now if only I could find Arturo O'Farrill's Blood Lines at that price...

Whoa. 1. Did they do this kind of thing often? 2. Who the hell is in that rhythm section?

How easy is it to search through the archives? I currently use the archive on newyorker.com - is this better than what you can see there?

I think you've made my point for me. (I'm saying this BTW as a piano player whose major influences and first transcriptions were of ALL of the above - Bud on "Wail," Sonny on "Airegin," Herbie on "Speak No Evil.") If you draw on Herbie's style you're going to inevitably get a ton of Bud in there anyway. If you ignore Herbie's style entirely while also not absorbing McCoy, Beirach, Muhal, Chick, Keith, Cecil, Jaki Byard, Andrew Hill, etc., you're basically saying "I didn't think there was anything useful to be had after Bud," which to me at least makes you seem incurious. The reaction I have to that is "Really?? What thought process is leading you to limit yourself creatively like this?" I get what you're saying about the legions of Herbie clones coming out of the schools today, but I guess my thinking here is that I think at least some of them are likely to eventually make something really interesting and creative. By emulating the Herbie/Ron/Tony quintet you're likely going to push on some kind of outer boundary that hasn't been entirely hashed out. I can't say the same for someone who's decided to go backwards.

That's true...but it's true largely because Herbie and McCoy's styles are (generally) more harmonically advanced than Bud and Sonny's. Most people just don't play like Bud and Sonny anymore and the reason is that Herbie and McCoy opened up new vistas in terms of what you could do harmonically, and people saw those vistas as useful places to go exploring. I think the reason a lot of people slag guys like Eric Alexander or Scott Hamilton is that they tend to neglect whole regions of the canon in ways that others don't. While the trend of people turning themselves of clones of Brecker isn't good either, at least when you copy Brecker's style you're reaping the benefit of Brecker's having digested his own influences so thoroughly. I love George Coleman's playing, but I also realize that there are a lot of cats that built important stuff on what he did, and you ignore them at your own artistic risk. There's a lot more that I think could be said on this but I guess the point I want to make is that probably nobody playing "jazz" as most of us think of it really has any hope of resonating with masses and masses of people, but if you don't at least try to move things forward in a meaningful way you are essentially condemning yourself to resonating with an audience that is only going to get older and smaller. If that's your thing, keep on keepin' on, but it isn't how I'd want my work to be remembered. Oh what the hell, one last thought. What do we mean when we say "in the tradition," anyway? Albert Ayler's work is almost 50 years old now, is that not also part of the tradition? The fusion era is about 40 years old. Fusion is only 15 years younger than Bird's last records! Does that qualify for the tradition? To be honest it's hard not to fault the professionalization of jazz education for this weird break in what came to be canonical. When Jamey Aebersold and David Baker and guys of their generation (and their acolytes) are still, effectively, setting down the rules for "how to learn to play jazz," you're going to see their particular views dominate an idea of what's within the bounds of the tradition and what isn't.

Interesting...see http://mws.amazon.com/ , which has links to all the APIs that I think Marketplace sellers are using. I leafed through the documentation a bit but haven't yet turned up the specific report type that would allow a seller to do huge bulk downloads of all his competitors' prices.