Big Wheel

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...

Those are just the jazz holdings. They also own tons and tons of other imprints in other genres. (Other EMI jazz labels off the top of my head: Liberty, Jubilee, United Artists, Solid State, Aladdin, Jazz West. I thought they also owned Elektra Musician but Wikipedia suggests it's a Warner holding. Maybe they only got part of the EM catalog like the Bird and Diz Washington concerts?)

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

Dead or alive, EMI seems to be gradually getting religion on downloads at least - many BN albums are on sale in mp3 format on Amazon now for $3.68. Or is this just a temporary promotion? In any case I think the article that kicked this thread off doesn't argue the its points very well. He basically says that taking DRM off mp3 downloads is what ultimately killed EMI, because then everyone just started pirating their stuff rampantly. (Because at the time, it was impossible to rip CDs and bittorrent them anyway??) Seems like the real problem was simple oversupply: in an environment of downloading, legal and otherwise, people just didn't want to keep plunking down $18 for CDs, and eventually a tipping point was reached where they just stopped buying them.

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.

Gotta love that outfit! Why do I want to pay Amazon $16 for a new copy of the Sonny Clark Quartets when I can get a used one from MM for $53? Espescially when MM also has it brand-new for $13.83. I'll bet that the $53.17 price for a "used--like new" copy is a glitch in their pricing software. It's 1 cent below the highest-price "used--like new," and generally they (and several of the others) try to be the cheapest by 1 cent. This is why I'd like to learn more about the systems that Amazon sellers use to interact with Amazon. My hunch in this case is that Moviemars undercut what was (at the time they posted the item) the only other used seller, but then probably simply didn't update its price once other sellers entered the marketplace offering the item for much less. From an economic perspective this seems like an inefficiency that hurts everybody (except newer/nimbler sellers) in the aggregate, so I'm curious whether Amazon is making things harder than they have to be for sellers or whether some sellers just have suboptimal systems interacting with Amazon's APIs.

I have a friend who works with an independent shop and it's as simple as it's easier to keep track of items if you have things only being sold from one place. If the item was in the store and on Amazon at the same time, you're going to disappoint some people online too frequently when you have to inform them the item is no longer available. And some of those people reach the conclusion that the store is trying to sell what they don't have and don't come back. Thus when they have something that they feel the local market isn't going to snap up, online it goes, and that's the only way to buy it. You'd think that modern IT would help eliminate this problem. There has to be an inventory system somewhere that can take this kind of purchase info from disparate sources and updates your databases nearly in real time. That way as soon as you ring up that CD, your system is telling Amazon to pull your listing from the store. I guess this must be too expensive for the little guy, though, so they end up wasting time dealing with all this crap manually.

Never heard of this stuff before you mentioned it! Horrors! I actually like Akvavit - I acquired a taste for it from my cousins, who had picked up a bunch of bottles of Aalborg when they lived in Copenhagen and gave me what was left of the last one when they moved to a different house. I currently have a nice bottle of OP Andersson from Sweden sitting in the freezer - much more balanced and less of a rye bread taste compared to the Aalborg.

I'm guessing you haven't sampled the delights of the Budweiser Chelada, then. You've tried lutefisk, I'm sure you can handle it. PS: my reaction to the chelada was exactly like this guy's: http://www.chow.com/stories/11552

The blocking is not by genre, it's usually by label because Youtube only blocks what a label has filed a complaint about. If EMI hasn't registered its songs in Youtube's "block this" database, then none of those songs will be detected and blocked.

Maybe the idea is to stimulate demand by selling the box sets at budget prices? (The supposed reasoning being, sure, nobody's buying individual discs at $16.98 these days, but maybe you'll buy a 7-disc set for under $40, netting the label money they wouldn't have made otherwise.) One can only hope...

To correct myself real quick: the video in the trial wasn't even on Youtube, according to the Washington Post story. It was uploaded onto Google Video. Google Video has changed so much since the Youtube acquisition that I don't even know how to evaluate the claims in the story (right now, Google Video doesn't appear to support comments or display how many times a video was viewed).

It was one of the most viewed in Italy, so I'd not say 'virtually nothing', and the news stories didn't report the percentage of flaggings and we don't have the complete sentence neither, that will be published in a month, so we are talking about 'virtually nothing'. "Most entertaining" by user votes, not most viewed. (Actually, it doesn't look like there is a "most entertaining" category - there's "most discussed," "top rated," "top favorited," "most viewed" - which look like lists of 100 videos in each of YT's 14 categories for every different country.) That's 14*4*100 = 5600 videos per country, every single day. I just reset my country in Youtube to Italy and clicked through the current "most viewed" list. This video is currently the 97th most viewed in Italy, and it already has 3000 views despite being up only 24 hours. The other video took 2 months just to get to 5500 views.

False. That's usually true, but not in 100% of cases. The dog might have gotten a smaller-than-usual dose of toxin (for example, if a toad had been hanging out in a water bowl or something hours before).

Don't disagree with you, but it will always be hard to know how many people would be necessary to make a "good faith" effort. I also don't know how many people actually did flag the video. If none did, then YouTube would have no reason to investigate. If many people did, then I would be more sympathetic to the court's ruling. I have heard that it can be notoriously difficult if you are a "little fish" to get YouTube to take copyright violations seriously and that should change too. Exactly. We're talking about a video with 5000 views; that's virtually nothing. The news stories tell us that people complained in the comments - but comments are not flaggings. As for copyright stuff, it's often hard to sort out the legitimate complaints in this area from the stupid ones. Many "little fish" can't get a major corporation's attention because they don't understand what they need to do to get a major corporation's attention, not because the corporation isn't listening. So you'll see people angry because they sent 5 complaining emails to an inbox that isn't anywhere close to the legal department, when all they had to do was call up their lawyer and have the lawyer contact the proper address, or even just fill out an online form that's been developed specifically to streamline copyright complaints.

I still think this is by far the best explanation for what happened. You have two dogs, one of whom has been conditioned (by either you or by experience) to stay away from toads. The other one has "never learned" and that's the one that displayed several classic symptoms of toad poisoning (including seizure). It looks like some dogs acquire a tolerance for toad poisoning over time, so it's possible that what in the past would have made the dog listless this time simply induced erratic behavior and a couple of minutes of convulsions.

Are you saying that Youtube should be automatically blocking some videos upon their upload? Youtube already does this for a lot of copyrighted material, to a pretty sophisticated degree. But that's relatively easy to do because "all" that is is comparing data in your database of copyrighted material with what's being uploaded. You can try to develop systems to flag potentially offensive videos automatically, but by doing so you're committing yourself to a game of cat and mouse. It's not easy to develop systems that reliably catch the bad stuff without having deleterious effects on the people with the good stuff; a signal of an "offensive" video is rarely as obvious as a ticking package. How do you analyze a video that has kids making fun of another autistic kid to know it's offensive? You can look at the tags, but there might not be any and they might be misleading. For instance, if you set up a rule that says "if the video contains a tag of 'Hitler,' require manual review", you're going to be inundated with hundreds of parodies of Downfall for every instance of actual neo-Nazi propaganda. And even if you manage to do this, the people uploading the bad stuff get better and better at getting around you. So Youtube appears to rely on crowdsourcing (flagging by users after the video is live) to determine what needs to be policed.

My guess: the one dog smelled an amphibian he'd had a previously nasty encounter with, the other didn't and was naive to that experience and so went after the toad. The rest can be fixed with a nice hit of Xanax.

Think about it this way. Of 20,000 Google employees, maybe - MAYBE - 2000 work on Youtube. ~1200 of these are engineers and have zero hands-on contact with the videos that are actually submitted. They only build the product. Most of the rest are in finance, product management, marketing, partnerships, etc. - also no contact with the enormous number of submitted videos. If I had to guess there are fewer than 100 people around the world doing Youtube community management and support. Say, 50 in the US, 30 in Europe, 20 in Asia/Australia. Tops. Of those 30 in Europe I doubt there are more than 3 focused on Italy and Italian videos. Their jobs entail way, way more than a daily perusing of the numerous automatically generated top lists on Youtube. They do things like fight spammers engaged in massive spam uploads, identify actual bugs, etc. The sheer scale of these products is so huge that it's easy to miss problems concerning a single video. Again, operating a product like Youtube means you have no choice but to prioritize relentlessly. Sure, a lot of people may have flagged this video - but there are probably millions of flaggings done every day on a site with at least 100 million videos on it. Given that the offending video had fewer than 100 views for every day it was up, it's quite likely that there were way more flaggings of other videos and this one sat on the bottom of the pile for awhile. (And forget about answering, or even reading, every email that comes in. And routinely reading through the comments on videos? Are you kidding?)

We're talking about South Florida here. The society would not have time for day jobs.