Guy Berger

Yuck

So count me in the “love pre-1974 Corea, mixed feelings about post-1974 Corea” camp but... I agree with a lot of your assessment, Jarrett’s increasingly monochromatic career during the last 45 years is not a good thing

Oh no. When he was at his best, he was one of the very very very best.

What about Jose Davila, the guy who plays with Threadgill? He's awesome

Yeah. Even once it's open to the general public, it might initially be hard to get a shot because everybody will rush to get it. But that initial rush will dissipate. I'm in my early 40s and (appropriately) in the back of the queue, but am pretty confident that by the end of June I'll be vaccinated (and possibly as early as May). One of the ironies of the scenario you describe is that, demand being relatively low is bad for our prospects of quickly crushing COVID. I'm guessing we'll have undervaccinated areas of the country (and even more so, world - since Americans are more pro-vaxx than, say, Europeans) that will remain dangerous to visit for quite some time. Just like we have CDC travel warnings for malaria or hepatitis, we'll probably say "country or region X has endemic COVID and we caution older travelers on going there".

FWIW, Dr Scott Gottlieb was saying on CNBC earlier this week that we're about to reach the point where supply exceeds demand and that vaccination will probably be open to the public by early April.

So far I've only listened to the 1964 set. IMHO despite not being a hardcore Johnny Coles fan, this group was much better before he got sick and left - he made the ensembles so much richer. re "how many 1964 recordings do we need"... hard to answer. Depends on how much you love the music. I bucket this with 1960s Coltrane and 1960s/70s Miles Davis ensembles where I'm glad to have a lot of recordings and in some cases wish we had more. Looking forward to spending time w/1975.

I like him, but find him a little “clunky” compared to his peers (Wayne Shorter and Joe Henderson most significantly, but also Dewey Redman, Bennie Maupin, Billy Harper and Charles Lloyd). IMHO he was best with Charles Mingus.

IMHO Wild Man Dance and Passin’ Thru, neither with Frisell, are great. They stack up pretty well relative to the live ECM (Rabo de Nube). I have heard the other recent Blue Notes, they’re fine, but streamed them each 1-2 times and haven’t been in a rush to pick them up.

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.