Guy Berger

I’d definitely put “P Bouk” from CANNONBALL IN EUROPE on there.

Really bad air here in the SF Bay Area. ironically the day with the “orange sky” and darkness at noonthat generated all those headlines was the last time it was safe-ish to breath outdoor air.

Some of my favorite Peacock is on Tony Williams’s SPRING.

We’re lucky to have this guy’s music.

Can’t wait to hear this.

Out of Our Heads records has a live show of the Michael Formanek quartet w/Tim Berne, Craig Taborn, Gerald Cleaver titled PRE-APOCALYPTIC: Link (Bandcamp) This is the same band that recorded THE RUB AND SPARE CHANGE and SMALL PLACES for ECM.

This album features Marc Ducret on guitar, not Ryan Ferreira

Giving this set a lot of listening this week. Spectacular music, some of the best Miles ever made.

“Jazz hands” is the biggest post-Coltrane stone-cold classic. Kenny G in 2nd place.

The swing era was 75 years ago, so that music was thoroughly "de-classic'd" a long time ago. Jazz's following in the 60s was bigger than it is today, but still pretty small relative to popular music of the day. That was also more than half a century ago!

I urge the moderators to close this thread and everyone else to discuss much better pianists like Don Pullen 🤣

In that case Jazz is totally fucked as far as “classic status” is concerned, pre- or post-Coltrane. Small and hermetic fan base, no hope whatsoever for universal acceptance.

http://intaktrec.ch/358-a.htm Two gigs by the core Snakeoil quartet (no guitar) from 2010 and 2017, on the Intakt label.

I don't know how I miss this the first time but I'm LOLing

In the case of the Mahavishnu, probably a lot of people have heard the music in question. The band sold a lot of albums by jazz standards! Anyway, "classic status" is pretty loosely defined. I'm taking it as music that's exceptionally good and memorable, that draws me in again and again.

A few more: Mahavishnu Orchestra, “The Dance of Maya” Keith Jarrett, “In Flight” Stan Getz, “How Long Has This Been Going On” (from BLUE SKIES) Paul Motian, “It Should’ve Happened a Long Time Ago” (TRIOISM version, not the earlier version on ECM)

Being a terrible person to others has become a way to affirm status and affiliation. "Vice signaling."

Miles Davis, "Pharaoh's Dance", is imho one of the most exciting jazz recordings of any era, pre or post Coltrane

Russell’s late 1960s / early 1970s music is some of the most exciting/vital of that era. I would much rather listen to it than to anything under Evans’s name.

A few things here. First, yes, cases are significantly undercounted (though less so than in March). There are multiple true COVID cases for each single measured case. As a result, the case fatality rate (CFR; COVID deaths as a share of measured COVID cases) is much higher than the infection fatality rate (IFR; COVID deaths as a share of both measured and unmeasured COVID cases). One of reasons the CFR has fallen a lot in recent months is just because we're testing more; testing is no longer limited to the very ill. Most estimates of the IFR range from something like 0.5%-1.2% (whereas earlier in the epidemic you routinely saw CFRs above 3% - think of NYC, Wuhan, Lombardy). The IFR *may* have been going down recently - possibly due to better treatment (we have a few effective therapeutics), maybe hospitals being less overloaded, maybe the cases skewing younger than before. Second, deaths are also undermeasured (though not nearly as much as cases). Attribution of deaths that are probably due to COVID varies from location to location, but excess "all-cause" deaths are much higher than official COVID deaths, suggesting many people are dying of the illness untested. Third, "COVID truthers" sometimes misleadingly compare the CFR from the flu to the IFR from COVID to suggest that COVID is equally or less dangerous than the flu. This is misinformation. The flu, probably even more than COVID, is massively undercounted - how many people do you know who have the flu and bother to get tested? COVID is way worse than the FLU.

Listening to THE HILL w/Richard Davis and Joe Chambers. Really good, one of my fave of Murray’s later Black Saints. Davis en fuego.

I'm worried about schools in person too, especially since we aren't doing even the minimum necessary to make them safer. Like a lot of the other reopening we've experienced in the US, it's founded upon magical thinking. This story from exurban Georgia was really jarring: "North Paulding High School, about an hour outside Atlanta, reopened Monday despite an outbreak among members of its high school football team, many of whom, a Facebook video shows, worked out together in a crowded indoor gym last week as part of a weightlifting fundraiser. Within days of that workout, several North Paulding players had tested positive for the coronavirus. The school’s parents were notified just hours before the first day of class. And multiple teachers at North Paulding say there are positive tests among school staff, including a staff member who came into contact with most teachers at the school while exhibiting symptoms last week."

I liked this one.

I thought the first one was a little too "slick", but the 2nd/3rd/4th ones are GREAT. Also, the two David Torn albums with Berne (Prezens, Sun of Goldfinger) are outstanding. And out of the 3 Michael Formaneks, the 1st and 3rd one are superb. Love it!!! And even among the more stereotypically "EicherSound"y records, there are some where it works fine and others where it IMHO damages the music. BTW, my biggest gripe of all... why do we spend so much energy and time talking about ECM relative to Black Saint/Soul Note... or Pi... or Intakt... or... there are a lot of great labels out there actively recording & releasing music, some with a currently higher batting average.

If Firebirds had been on Blue Note, it’d be regularly as a freebop classic. Ancient Ritual is excellent too.