Guy Berger

I'm a Charles Lloyd fan, but have been kind of hit and miss picking up his new albums. This latest one has me pretty interested - he performs two Ornette Coleman tunes, "Ramblin" and "Peace". "Ramblin" popped up on my spotify last night and it's really enjoyable... this kind of ragged avant-garde blues is Lloyd's natural element. Apologies for linking to a press release but here's Blue Note's website

I disagree. I’m in favor of prioritization, but it’s much better to have people jumping the line than not vaccinated at all.

Without getting too into the politics, and speaking as someone who thinks Cuomo's record under COVID is wildly overrated (and that he is ridiculous for bragging about it)... New York has been one of the better states at vaccinating people. If you want to bash Dem Governors, you should be going after CA/MN/VA - they are currently at the bottom of the list. Generally speaking though there doesn't seem to be much of a partisan pattern in vaccination success. I'd also say that while Israel & the UAE by far the runaway vaccination champions... the US is doing far, far better than Europe so far (with the exception of the UK).

It's really unfortunate that antibody tests are unreliable on an individual level.

Glad to hear you guys are hanging inthere, Dub Modal & Dmitry.

I agree Dan, there's reason to feel optimistic that the pace of vaccination will pick up further.

Thanks for sharing.

Why should we assume there is equality of opportunities.

Dan since you guys are in Florida and have relatively benign weather, I strongly recommend that if you do meet them, you meet them outdoors in a back yard. If you do, can you open windows to ventilate? Extended exposure in ventilated closed spaces are really bad news as far as covid transmission goes... even if people wear masks the whole time. And you have to take masks off to eat.

Just doing some very simple math... if deaths are randomly distributed (not actually true), we end up at 700,000 COVID, deaths (~0.2% of the US population) and each person knows 500/1,000/2,000 people (too high? too low?), then the probability of any given person knowing a dead-from-COVID person is 63.2%/86.5%/98.2%.

Today was the first day when someone I know died of this horrible pandemic.

Sonny talking about Ornette is so interesting.

Wishing you a speedy recovery, Dmitry.

Mass vaccinations are a totally different endeavor than typical western health care - it’s not surprising to me that rich world governments are (initially) botching it. More about logistics and efficiency than about health care.

bingo to both of Dan’s paragraphs. even 1% fatality rate (which is probably closer to the mark than 4%) with 25%-70% of all Americans infected means 850K-2.38M dead bodies. That’s incredibly grim. This pandemic is particularly insidious because it’s not dangerous enough to most individuals to discourage transmission-facilitating behavior, but dangerous enough to kill a lot of people once a ton are infected. Couple that with asymptomatic transmission and we’re really fucked.

So upfront, I have a close acquaintance who was in general quite careful and has no idea where they got it; their 3 obvious potential contacts tested negative. (It’s possible that one of those 3 contacts had it a few weeks earlier, was a symptomatic, transmitted it and recovered sufficiently to test negative by the time the acquaintance tested positive.) Their riskiest activities were a masked doctor’s office visit, picking up to go food, and having a socially distant and masked outdoor hangout with a friend. Fortunately the acquaintance’s case was very mild and they recovered quickly. I think it would have been possible (not necessarily practical) for this person to be even more careful - forgoing paid childcare, preventing their toddler from seeing other kids outdoors, etc. My guess is that once prevalence in a community goes up sufficiently, a lot of medium risk behaviors become high risk and low risk behaviors become medium risk and very low risk behaviors become low risk.

I’m reasonably optimistic that the disease’s trajectory will be improving in Europe and North America by the spring and maybe a little sooner. The combination of vaccinations (the current logistical problems will be overcome) and better weather will turn this thing around. I do think as we head to the fall there will be a pretty big disparity between regions of the world that have been thoroughly vaccinated and those that are not. I suspect many of the latter will be shunned by travelers. Additionally I expect that a lot of employers and airlines etc will require proof of vaccination.

Fuck. Really sorry to hear that Dave. Hope your buddy pulls through and has a thorough, rapid recovery.

Favorites: Paul Motian, I Have the Room Above Her Billy Hart, One Is the Other Charles Lloyd, Lift Every Voice David Torn, Prezens David Torn, Sun of Goldfinger Tim Berne, Incidentals Michael Formanek, The Rub and Spare Change Fly, Year of the Snake Lee Konitz, Live at Birdland Vijay Iyer, Far from Over Jack DeJohnette, Made in Chicago Mark Turner, Lathe of Heaven Michael Formanek, The Distance Tim Berne, The Shadow Man Tim Berne, You’ve Been Watching Me Paul Motian, Lost in a Dream Charles Lloyd, Rabo de Nube

So a story about a close acquaintance. I’ve known a few people who have gotten COVID - either co-workers or former high school classmates. But someone i know well came down with it recently. Fortunately it was a very mild case. Symptoms were like a cold - and not a very serious cold. Cough for a few days, a lot of congestion. No fever. They got really lucky. They also have no idea how they got it. They’re working from home and have been fairly careful. Their spouse and kid tested negative, as did the nanny and her family. Maybe at a recent doctors appointment or via a surface or getting to go food? (They live in a place where outdoor and indoor dining are currently prohibited.) A few other comments... they had a first hand encounter with the unreliability of antigen (rapid) test. After a few days of symptoms they got such a test and it came back negative! Then just to be sure the following day they took a PCR test which came back positive. So they only found out they were positive 6 days after symptoms (=8 days after being contagious).

Btw it’s kind of tangential to this thread but the version of “How Long Has This Been Going On” from Getz’s Blue Skies is incredible - my favorite version of that standard.

Love this album. Hart was also on 4 Charles Lloyd ECMs, of which my favorites are Canto and Lift Every Voice. And of the 2 ECMs under Hart’s name, One Is the Other is really really great.

I like the 3CD set (especially for Bennie Maupin) but this band wasn't anywhere near as good as the other two you mention.

One thing we're relatively lucky on with a coronavirus pandemic (vs. an influenza pandemic) is that it tends to mutate more slowly. Most experts aren't terribly worried about the vaccine's effectiveness against this new lineage, for instance. The worry about extra contagiousness is that even if the virus isn't inherently more deadly, there could be significant 2nd order impacts on mortality from deterioration of the health care system. Yup. Travel restrictions can be pretty effective at limiting pandemics, but only when you do them well ahead of time. The horse left the barn a long time ago.

This isn't true except in a fairly limited sense. Plenty of rural areas are being really hard hit in the US right now. Density of real-life social/economic networks probably matters more than physical density.