Big Wheel

And one more: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxX15ziypzs&fmt=18

Been thinking a lot about some of these players lately. Don't feel I have much of interest to say about the subject yet, but here are three youtube videos I've been enjoying:

I a) haven't heard much Larry Ochs and b) have no desire to get into the debate of what jazz is for the 10000th time, but I heard Ochs's bandmate Steve Adams recently and that cat can DEFINITELY play bop backwards and forwards. Even though his band was comprised of a laptop plinking out all kinds of weird stuff instead of a drummer and bassist, you could tell that he had mastered the language.

Just because it's a test pressing doesn't mean that Mosaic is the seller. I took a closer look at the page for the seller of that Miles test pressing and they are also selling Harry Potter figurines. Perhaps one of our recently joined members would care to elaborate more on these listings.

Less unintentional but no less funny:

Swan is excellent and an institution BUT I would avoid it on the weekends. You'll have to wait, standing outside, about an hour to get a seat. If you don't care about the experience and just want good seafood there are plenty of other good places in the city for that. Weekdays are likely a safer bet, or you can try getting there early to beat the crowds on a Saturday. I can recommend a bunch of restaurants in the area (especially SF itself but also some around the Bay) if you give some more details on what cuisines you are a fan of.

Most of what has been written on Afro-Cuban music by English-speaking writers has been complete bullshit, but Roberts's The Latin Tinge struck me as exceptionally good and I used it heavily as a source for a college paper. One of these days I should check it out again.

Maybe...I was surprised to hear that Queen wasn't mad that Wayne's World used the song for the movie and an accompanying video that spliced in the original music video with cuts of Wayne and Garth. In any case I thought it was a fun tribute on the 18th anniversary of the man's death.

Roland's repair department's advice: don't heat it, that'll make it stickier. They suggest using one of those electronic freeze sprays (some kind of hydrocarbon) to make the goo cold and brittle, then chisel it off with a screwdriver. Yuck...

It appears that this is related to an imminent reissuing of much of the Zappa catalog. Most of these 1995 CDs are now discounted at Amazon and DeepDiscount.com if they are still available. Has anyone heard these new versions yet? I can't seem to find a ton of info on release dates and am trying to decide whether it's worthwhile to just pick up the old versions. My main goal is to avoid the albums that FZ butchered with redone drums and so forth (I know some of the 1995 series suffered from this). Imminent reissues? I very much doubt it. ZFT can barely handle issuing a couple of titles per year, them reissuing the whole FZ catalog of 70+ titles in unthinkable. Just two recent ZFT releases can conditionally qualify as reissues: MOFO (which contains the original mono mix of Freak Out!), and Lumpy / Money containing mono mix of "We're Only in it for the Money" and an a few rare versions of "Lumpy Gravy". Many FZ titles desperately need a new reissue treatment, "Hot Rats", "Uncle Meat" and "Sheik Yerbouti" in particular. My main source for the "imminent reissues" was this thread on a Zappa usenet list, but after doing some more digging I'm inclined to think your view is closer to reality. There are a small handful of titles at CDUniverse listing a November 17 release date, but I'm thinking I should grab what I can at the lower prices and not hold out for Gail.

It appears that this is related to an imminent reissuing of much of the Zappa catalog. Most of these 1995 CDs are now discounted at Amazon and DeepDiscount.com if they are still available. Has anyone heard these new versions yet? I can't seem to find a ton of info on release dates and am trying to decide whether it's worthwhile to just pick up the old versions. My main goal is to avoid the albums that FZ butchered with redone drums and so forth (I know some of the 1995 series suffered from this).

Hey all - I have a Roland XP-80 that dates back to 1997. The synth was affected by the "melting pink glue" problem that's affected a lot of Roland instruments of that vintage. Basically the epoxy that fixed the keys in place broke down or melted and leaked all over the thing while it sat in my old room at my mom's house in Florida, sometime between September 2000 and 2008. I didn't notice the problem until late 2008 when I finally decided to start playing the instrument again. The good news: Roland replaced the whole key assembly for free and the unit seems to work fine. The bad news: they didn't go all out in cleaning up the unit and there is still some goop on the exterior, especially on the power cord but also some under the keys and on the top. (Probably didn't help that I stupidly have been storing the keyboard in the old goop-soiled gig bag until I can buy a new one.) How do I get this crap off? The general consensus on the web seems to be that using a hair dryer will help heat the glue till you can more easily wipe it off the metal. This seems to be working a little...but it's going to take a lot of time with the hair dryer I've got. Any ideas if anything will work better? Also, is it safe to heat the power cord or do I need to try a different approach for that? Goo Gone seems to be useless in this case, plus it's not recommended for use on rubber.

I took the list from Wiki, and I have to agree with you, Henry Sugar (and even The Vicar) definitely ride the line and are not entirely "kids' books." I probably would read some of the stories to my kids but not all. I'm currently skimming his description of going to English public school. What a sea change. It is astounding how in a relatively short period, collectively most Western nations decided that corporal punishment, particularly by teachers, was unacceptable. I'm certainly not sorry I missed out on beatings at school (even if it would have made me a better writer). Still, Boy is in the box set, and Henry Sugar could have been included as well. It would have fit thematically anyway. I did read The Vicar of Nibbleswicke. It is one of the last things he wrote -- a fable of sorts that was to benefit a charity working with people with dyslexia. It's fine but very slight. Unfortunately because some of the reversed words are kind of obscene, I'm going to hold off on reading it to my kids for now. So I would probably have put it into the adult column. (And I would generally recommend just borrowing it from the library.) Thanks for the summary of Nibbleswicke. To be honest I think you could probably read most of the stories in Henry Sugar to a kid. The main Henry Sugar story is relatively tame and a good adventure, and The Boy Who Talked With Animals and The Hitchhiker have kind of fun endings IIRC. The main exceptions are: -The Mildenhall Treasure: Some kids may find it boring. -The Swan: This is the one I would definitely NOT read to kids under 11 or so. The ending is pretty nightmarish. I suspect this may be why Henry Sugar was left out of this collection - while most of the other stories on there (like The Witches, Danny the Champion of the World, or Great Glass Elevator) have their intense, even horrible moments, everything tends to end up just fine in the end. Not so in The Swan.

Meant to reply to this last week but got caught up. The Henry Sugar book is well worth it - more adult-oriented than most of his other work. I remember being especially fond of the non-fiction stories at the end...kind of an interesting companion to the autobiographical "Boy.". Haven't read any of the other non-included ones, though The Vicar of Nibbleswicke always sounded intriguing.

I feel much more sympathy for Nnamdi Asomugha, the best cornerback in the league. By most accounts he's one of the best human beings in the league too, and he may finish his career with zero rings if he can't get dealt to another team.

Tons of people have been parroting some variation on this theme but if anything, I agree with those who say that this has it exactly backwards. It means that Belichick has MORE respect for his defense, not less, because he's willing to bet that they can hold their opponent to zero points not just when they have to drive 70 yards, but also when they have to go only 30 yards.

Hm, so what about getting an ipod that isn't made by Apple? Are there such things? MG You probably aren't going to find one that's much more versatile in terms of file formats. Basically all of these players are designed for the casual listener - people who have maybe 300 tracks with all of them acquired in similar circumstances. If all you have is CDs that you purchased and other files that are already in .mp3 format, things will be easy as pie. If you have a lot of tapes, acetates, vinyl, lossless files, etc. you are going to need to learn a bit beyond the basics to be able to put them on any portable music player.

This is what I do - I have a 500GB external hard drive where all the music lives, so I can use it as a backup if anything ever happens to my iPod. The only real complications were when I needed to switch computers this summer (the drive letters assigned to the HD by each machine were different and this screwed up the iTunes library). Things do get trickier if you have a lot of files in non-Apple recognized formats. I recently acquired a bunch of live stuff in FLAC format and need to convert it using another program before it can go into the iPod.

One more...Roy Haynes with Pat Metheny, Donald Harrison, and Peter Washington, 11/7/1996. The New Yorker confirms that Haynes was booked at the Vanguard starting on the 5th. Harrison sounds excellent as usual on this.

That's a strawman. Nobody in this thread ever claimed that there isn't anybody who thinks that how musicians dress is somehow related to how good their music is. All I'm saying is that most listeners are smarter than this, and that there is rarely anything ironic about their behavior when they criticize musicians' sartorial choices.

When I wrote that 6 years ago I got the title wrong. It's "I Walk With Music." Must have been one of the side effects of being in college... Listening to the sound samples at CD Universe again I did notice this time that her intonation is somewhat off on some of the ballads. I think I must have been listening to the up tunes or else was just more oblivious to that kind of thing back then. Yanow at AMG panned the record...it's been a long time that I listened to it but I'm thinking I must have felt that Connor's sensitivity with these tunes carried the day. Interesting fact I learned today: Chris Connor was gay. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/01/arts/music/01connor.html

See, I don't think the difference is huge at all. In fact I think it's rather a distinction without a difference. Look, almost nobody sneers at suits because the player is taking care of his outfit. People generally look good in suits, and few are so petty to simply go after that. Rather, the sneering is because the suit connotes a bunch of cultural notions (see Bev's post) that are often going on in the head of the guy wearing the suit. It isn't contingent on how well or poorly the cat plays (although I figure that playing badly or playing in a style that the sneerers are not a fan of is likely to amplify the sneers). To put it a little differently, those who are critical of the suit while saying attire has no importance to the music aren't being self-contradictory because their criticism is of the person and their attitude, not the music that they are making.

Er...how is that ironic? In my experience such sneering isn't criticizing the wearing of suits but rather the idea (implied or directly expressed by many of the neoboppers in question) that your performance or worth as a musician is somehow better if everyone adheres to a dress code of wearing suits. That's an arguable position to take, and it comes in a variety of flavors from "only the music matters" to "the goal of playing this music is not to make a digestible product for bourgeois white people", but it certainly isn't ironic. Parallel example from the political world: Neoconservatives are obsessed with the power of "will" in issues of foreign policy - they believe that wars are won and lost depending on who has a greater will to win. Now, I a) find the idea of "will" to be completely lacking in importance in war and thus I b) sneer at neoconservatives on a regular basis for holding such laughably misguided ideas. But there's nothing ironic about my doing both a) and b) together.

Bumping this thread to note some other unofficial issues that I turned up on one of those sites we shall not name: -There's a Rahsaan Roland Kirk gig on 4/4/1974 that King Ubu mentioned on his blog. GREAT show. -Elvin Jones's Jazz Machine, April 9 & 10, 1982. Chick Corea is supposedly in the band although I can't hear him at all on the tape that's supposedly from 4/9. The only piano is on the 4/10 recording...and it doesn't really sound like Chick to me. The feel just isn't Chick's, it sounds like a more typical boppish cat like George Cables, and it sounds like the piano player is grunting along with himself during the piano solos, in a very raspy voice. Never heard Chick do that before. Could it be Kenny Kirkland? He was recording with Elvin around this time, but it doesn't really sound like him to me either. I would put my money on Cables before either of the other two. To complicate matters, the bass player on this session is supposed to be Stanley Clarke. Clarke and Corea were recorded together live in California a week before this gig. They were also videotaped playing in Southern California on the 7th. If anything, rather than making me think that Corea was playing with Elvin in NYC on the 10th, this makes me suspect that Clarke isn't, either. While I can't say for sure whether these tapes were made on these dates, I was able to confirm using the New Yorker magazine's digital archive that both groups were booked at the Vanguard during the dates they claim to be. Also, I reconfirmed the George Russell date mentioned upthread in case there was any doubt from the NYT.

Hmmm...there could also be a weird issue with how Verizon is connecting to Organissimo's servers, I guess. I don't remember if Jim mentioned where the server is located, but I'm guessing it's not part of a major datacenter. Whereas most of the other sites you visit are probably jacked in pretty close to network backbones (think all Google properties including Blogger blogs, all Yahoo properties including Flickr, major newspapers, major retailers, etc. I wonder if Verizon routes traffic such that the pipe is big enough to easily handle spikes in traffic to the big boys, but they suffer congestion to smaller sites during times of increased usage. Just armchair theorizing - I don't claim to be a network engineer.