Big Wheel

Yeah, that is a little odd considering the new price for big boxes is $17 per disc. I wonder if they are experimenting a little bit to see what happens when giving customers a break around the shipping threshold of $150. Total cost with shipping is $159, whereas if it were priced normally at $153 it would be $165.

A meme is a more general concept than a catchphrase and not necessarily transient, like a fad is. "Not so much" is a meme that also is a catchphrase, but bacon (or really, the wacky fixation some people seem to have recently acquired with bacon) obviously isn't a catchphrase. And I think it's at least arguable that that fixation isn't really a fad. From wikipedia:

http://www.azcentral.com/ent/pop/articles/1031catchphrases1031.html

I haven't noticed anything particularly in the last few months, but it does seem like it's become more popular in the last few years. My completely uninformed guess is that Jon Stewart is actually responsible for the phrase becoming popular again. The ironic "not so much" when you really mean "the diametric opposite" strikes me as an old Yiddishism, though I have no evidence to prove it.

That was her sister, you assclown.

A suggestion: when locking threads, I think it would be useful if the moderator who closed the thread posted a brief (1 sentence) explanation of why they locked it. Two reasons for this: 1) It gives the moderators a bit of a human face and at least counteracts the perception that any thread of yours can be "bombed from 30000 feet", so to speak, without you having any idea who did it or why; 2) It gives people an idea of how the moderators tend to interpret the rules. If I have no idea what caused a thread to get locked, I'm not going to do anything different in the future. Whereas if I know that the moderators generally lock threads for doing X, I'm probably going to be more cautious when I think about posting something with X in it. I realize that this kind of non-anonymous moderation means that a mod will probably get more PMs from people contesting the decision to lock. NOT saying that a mod needs to respond to these and engage people in long discussions over this or that point - but as we can see in this thread, the current system of moderating isn't exactly preventing those kinds of annoying discussions, either. It just tends to make them more public because lots of others get confused as to what the hell happened.

I don't remember but it's usually unreasonable for larger CD orders. I think they do something like $1 per CD no matter how many you order, so until this $2.95 deal was posted they wanted to charge me something like $15 for a 15-CD order.

Via Dave Liebman's newsletter, some gospel: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXDlAZJm19Y&feature=player_embedded

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.