Guy Berger

I love this one too, and really like his playing on it. I'm not a giant fan and find him somewhat tedious in a trio format, but the stuff that irritates other folks on this thread doesn't really bother me.

I've been thinking of picking some of these up... interested in folks' opinions. Ravi Coltrane, Spirit Fiction Rudresh Mahanthappa & Bunky Green, Apex Chris Potter, The Sirens Chris Potter, Imaginary Cities

Saw this group last night. Great music; more improvisational and harder-hitting than the album.

What do you think of the new album? I like it quite a bit, but it may be too ECMy for some.

For sure! Where the conflict arises is that a nontrivial share of fans simultaneously (1) believe that knowing the numbers makes you "a better fan" & (2) can't or don't want to the homework. That's a recipe for frustration. I agree with Paul that 1 is BS, 100%. But I get the feeling this is not a consensus among thread participants.

Miles Davis, in a blindfold test, commenting on Oscar playing "Joy Spring" [lifted from an Ethan Iverson blog item]: Oscar makes me sick because he copies everybody. He even had to learn how to play the blues. Everybody knows that if you flat a third, you’re going to get that blues sound. He learned that and runs it into the ground worse than Billy Taylor. You don’t have to do that. Now take the way he plays that song. That’s not what Clifford meant. He passes right over what can be done with the chords. It’s much prettier if you get into it and heard the chords weaving in and out like Bill Evans and Red Garland could do – instead of being so heavy. Oscar is jazzy; he jazzes up the tune. And he sure has devices, like certain scale patterns, that he plays all the time. Does he swing hard like some people say? I don’t know what they mean when they say ‘swing hard’ anyway. Nearly everything he plays, he plays with the same degree of force. He leaves no holes for the rhythm section. The only thing I ever heard him play that I liked was his first record of “Tenderly.”

But conversation in what context? In a fun, informal discussion among some friends/acquaintance it gets pretty annoying to have some know-it-all arrogantly lording it over everyone. But when people take things a little more seriously and results/reality-oriented - and fandoms are susceptible to this, not just GM offices - it's inevitable that someone will pull out the facts bazooka. Moose, I think you highlight something really important - this is a characteristic of fandoms; fans take whatever they love really seriously and get into ridiculous, trivial fights over it. The one twist is that sports aren't really subjective like musical tastes (unless people want to debate who has the most elegant fadeaway jump shot), even in the Trump era; teams win or they lose.

Absolutely. Any "data person" that tells you "instinct" (or for that matter "subject matter expertise") is worthless is full of crap. But it's also true that (1) most peoples' instincts are crap and (2) instinct/data work as complements not substitutes.

But "what you think will happen" is the most valuable information for GMs and talent planners, assuming it is reasonably accurate. And since fans place a higher value on winning teams than on flawed-but-easy-to-understand statistics, I suspect the more complex measures are going to become more, not less entrenched among professionals. As a result the amateur faux-statistics culture that exists within sports fandom will continue to struggle between the poles of accuracy/reality and simplicity.

Seems like we're arguing at cross-purposes here. Some aspects of science/technology keeps the devices we're all typing functioning and makes some devices better than others. Most people don't really want to know what makes some devices better than others, they just wanna type. The end.

I have one Spiritualized album - Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space - and I think it's OK. Not bad, not great. I've heard some Explosions in the Sky on Pandora and they're not really my thing - they kind of sound like generic instrumental guitar rock.

Another one that was released around the same era which might fit in the genre - Add N to X, AVANT HARD.

I went through a phase (almost 20 years ago - yikes!) where I listened to a bunch of this stuff - Tortoise, Stereolab, Labradford, Godspeed, Gastr del Sol, The Sea and Cake, Don Caballero (if you throw them into this bucket), Isotope 217 (which might be more jazz-rock than post-rock...) In retrospect a lot of it just elicits a shrug from me. "Djed" is a masterpiece and the Tortoise album TNT is one of my personal favorites, I also enjoy Stereolab, but if I never hear the rest of those bands again that would be no major tragedy. (Though it also would be no major tragedy if I did hear them again. ) If you like post-rock, you should check out the final two Talk Talk albums (SPIRIT OF EDEN, LAUGHING STOCK). Masterpieces that anticipated elements of the style. Another pretty good album is Bark Psychosis's HEX. PS Sigur Ros came around after I moved onto other music, but I've liked what I've heard.

Interesting to think of this as part of the overall global/social/political backlash against "elites" and "experts". (Which, at least in the US, goes back over 200 years, as the Federalist party discovered to its dismay.)

Faux-mathematical/faux-statistical debates are a big part of sports fandom and, as a result, there's demand for basic/comprehensible metrics, even if they're inaccurate or misleading, just so ordinary fans have something to cite in "debates". But that doesn't mean that the nerdier fans who want to "fundamentally understand" sports should stick to those same inaccurate, misleading metrics.

Scott, what do you mean?

Has there been out-of-sample testing of predictions conditional on this specific statistic? Seems like that would be an easy way to resolve this debate. follow-up: So it seems like WAR has predictive value, though you'd also need to benchmark it against alternative statistics.

#1 - I think that question/threshold isn't quite the correct one. If you're a GM with a $X budget for players, you'll be able to squeeze extra wins/success out of that budget using stats-based analysis. But if you have a small budget, even the most efficient & statistically-informed decision-making might not be sufficient to win a World Series. It might not even be sufficient to generate a winning season. #2 - As statistically-informed decision-making has become more prevalent in MLB, the A's edge on this front has probably faded. (In fact, even if other teams had never adopted this decision-making, the A's success would still be disrupted by rich teams poaching the A's best players.) Sabermetrics is like savvy financial investing. It's about getting a higher return on your portfolio by buying undervalued assets at a discount. In investment this is fine because buying a crappy asset that's priced as super-crappy could net you a nice profit. In baseball acquiring a good player who's priced as a mediocre player will not necessarily win you the big prize.

They are a really nice & witty touch on "Dinosaur" which is a delightful tune.

Thrak was a weird one for me; very good songwriting, among the group's best, coupled with relatively uninteresting instrumentals. The 72-74 band turned on its head!

Did some great stuff with McCoy Tyner and Weather Report. I heard some of his more fusiony stuff on Pandora and liked it. Guy

No. It's the worst of their studio albums up to that point. (I didn't realize they had no others afterward.)

Seems like "timeless" boils down to "stuff I like / don't like" intermingled with the listener's age and the confusing phenomenon of "retro".

I don't think those two properties are mutually exclusive. Howe, Kaye and Bruford, absolutely; other members, not necessarily.

I think the band w/Tony Kaye was underrated, and the band w/Rick Wakeman (after Bruford left) overrated - I would rather listen to Time and a Word than to Tales from Topographic Oceans or Going for the One, though I enjoy those two albums too. And my opinion on 90125 has softened over time - not necessarily my cup of tea, but not bad either. Also, I recently picked up the debut album - mostly of historical interest but also some good music on there.