Big Wheel

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.

It probably depends on what type of broadband connection you have but I could envision a scenario where it's not the server causing slowness, but something on your ISP's end. For instance, lots of rain = more people in your area staying home = more people eating up bandwidth allocated by the ISP = the series of tubes gets more congested than usual.

Any wingnut who can string together a subject and verb can get a gig at the Hoover Institution. (I'm looking at you, Christopher Hitchens.) The only thing this type of occurrence says about Stanfurd is that they are too polite to tell Herbert Hoover's ghost to go fuck itself and boot the Institution off campus.

Come to think of it, that would make a great reality show. "Runaway" - I can see it now. Take 10 kids, turn 'em loose for a couple of months (tracked by cameras, of course), and see how they fend for themselves. Great TV ensues...and we all learn a little something at the end of the day.

The best marketing trick I've seen was when Blue Note signed a talented young female singer/piano player to make a pop record which proceeded to go platinum ten times over, thus saving their reissue program and making it possible for them to crank out tons of jazz from new artists too. Oh, wait...

I think it's likely that this box is about to become a "lightning deal" in about an hour at Amazon US. The teaser reads: "Upcoming Deal A hard-swinging, hard-living empress of jazz gets the deluxe treatment." Link: http://www.amazon.com/gp/goldbox/ref=cs_top_nav_gb27

Surely I can't be the only one cynical enough to think that a couple who appeared on Wife Swap probably aren't above pulling a stunt to dominate an entire day's news coverage... Edit: especially a couple that made their kids make this.

Heads up - the big 6CD, 12-session Garner box on Telarc is now another cheapo box set deal. I haven't cracked mine open yet but I got mine from Newbury comics for $10 in-store. They are listing it online for $7 plus $3 shipping. See http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/B00...p;condition=new

I think this is a quite valid statement...Herbie worked through early Evans influence fairly quickly....truthfully, I think he got on his own road pretty quickly..the way he comped for Wayne, the voicings & harmonies & textural approaches, I don't think Bill Evans would have even thought about going there...Bill was quite happy playing finely honed "trio songs", Herbie was thinking orchestral and allowed Tony & Wayne to do the same (as was also their natural wont to a large extent). Bottom line for me, I see Evans as a hugely important voice, but not so much for what that voice spoke itself as for what it stirred in the imaginations of other voices, voices who would speak more strongly, more boldly, and more clearly defined than the voice that initially inspired them. I think this is fairly close to the mark. In terms of pure playing, the left-hand voicings Evans (and Wynton Kelly) played were a big influence on almost everyone in the next generation. Herbie took those voicings and used them as a jumping-off point. Example: that break on bar 7 of "Eye of the Hurricane" off Maiden Voyage. On the one hand, Bill Evans never would have played that chord in this context. It's a dense voicing so it's possible I didn't transcribe it right, but I think the notes are (low to high) D, G, Ab, C and then in the right hand, G, Bb, Db, Gb. There are multiple dissonant elements in this chord, but the biggest dissonances come from the Gb, G, and Ab and C, Db, and D all existing in the voicing at the same time - putting 3 adjacent semitones in the same chord like that is generally regarded as a big no-no if you want to sound "good" or "inside". The whole notion of "inside" in a way really can be thought of as having Bill Evans as a major boundary, at least as far as the piano goes. On the other hand, the left hand structure is PURE Bill Evans. That way of putting the 9th and 13th along with the 3rd and 7th in the left hand* - Evans was a huge popularizer of that style. Herbie took that sound, used it as a base, and then blew it wide open. Compositionally, there's no question about it. I mean, how can you listen to everything that came before and then everything that came after a tune like "Gloria's Step" and say that Evans wasn't influencing that approach? Edit: I forgot that GS was actually composed by LaFaro, but I think the point still holds if you consider the trio's influence as a unit. Yeah, people had been fooling around here and there with getting away from the circle of fifths in the tunes they played, but what Evans and LaFaro did really crystallized things. *I'm assuming the root of this chord is Bb, although truth be told I don't remember what the bass plays.

Kind of torn on this one. I already have the Dameron, the Hope, Tenor Madness, and Dig It and the only other ones I think are priorities for me are the Waldron and Soul Junction. Do I really need the Draper and Ammons sessions?

Lesser-known titles I think you shouldn't miss: Elmo Hope: Hope-Full Jason Lindner Big Band: Premonition Memphis Slim's All Kinds of Blues is hitting pretty heavy rotation also. Edit: one more good one is Hal Galper Live at Redux '78. The Breckers are burning on this one!

They are a mixed bag. Basically, these issues are not really a "reissue project". It's just Sony slapping a lower price on titles that are already out there, some of which have recent remasterings, some of which don't. In the case of Filles the 2008 "issue" should be exactly the same as the 2002 Deluxe Edition issue (and this holds true for all the Miles 60s quintet titles priced at this level, such as Sorcerer, as all these titles were remastered around that time). For titles which were not remastered recently, you're just going to get the same version that was out in the 90s (i.e., still the most recent version of that title). Tatum's Piano Starts Here and the recently discussed Weather Report debut album are examples of this.

Yeah, those creme based bottles can get mighty funky with age (hence the original poster's distinction of what he had in the fridge). My dad has a bottle of snake wine that was a gift while on a trip to China sometime in the early '80s. It's one of those things that tasted so awful when it new no one is sure if it's gone bad. I tried another little taste last May. I didn't think any damage was done, but now I think the slang part of my brain may have taken a hit. There's an unopened bottle of Hiram Walker Creme de Menthe in my mom's liquor cabinet that looks nothing like the modern Hiram Walker packaging. Most of the liquor in our house dates from my birth in 1982 (nobody in the immediate family was a big hard alcohol drinker but they had a big party at the house so they felt obligated to stock up). But this bottle looks way older than you'd expect something made in 1982 to be. Finally curiosity got the better of me and I started playing detective. There's a 7-digit phone number and name on the bottle and I do a Google search for it and find that that number is still in use by a liquor store by that exact name in Panama City, FL (600 miles from my parents' house). And I found another site run by this guy who collects liquor stamps used by state beverage commissions. The Florida stamp on this bottle dates back to the period 1947-49 - meaning that most likely my great-grandmother brought the bottle to my grandparents for my father's birth in 1949 in Tallahassee, and nobody drank it then either.

Jazz Loft is good, but not perfect either. They had a Pullen Select listed in stock shortly after this thread started. I placed an order for it, got a order in process notice and received the OOS e-mail two days later. Yeah, me too. Alan at the Jazzloft called me because he had gotten like 12 orders in a day for the Pullen and only had one in stock. He was unaware of what had gone down at Mosaic and apparently does all the updating of his website manually.