Stompin at the Savoy

Collect whatever music and format you like. Ignore people who put down the stuff you like - you don't have to please them.

I don't think anyone really hates vinyl; they dislike the high prices and profiteering of new vinyl and the vinyl resurgence.

I've been collecting Mosaic sets for decades. I also own more books than anyone I know. I have other good-sized collections of physical objects, like guitars, board games, cookware, etc. So I think I get the idea of collecting physical objects. 78s, 45s, LPs, CDs, SACDs, laser disks etc are all physical methods of music distribution. Streaming and downloads are also methods of music distribution but do not rely upon a single physical object like a CD or LP but can instead be kept on various types of devices, copied, moved from device to device and so forth. These are still a conveyance for music, just more fluid about where the actual music data resides. Some people collect music as physical artifacts: LPs, CDs etc. The physical thing is part and parcel of what they are collecting. Their experience of owning music is one to one with owning physical objects. I have no quarrel with this and do it to some extent myself. Others, myself included, are in recent years mainly collecting "music", not the artifact containing the music. Similarly, I still enjoy album art and accompanying booklets but mostly view them via photographs. Which distribution format the music came in is less significant to me now than owning the music itself, which is to say: being able to access the music (and discography) whenever I want to listen. I'm still collecting but not any one format or delivery mechanism. I do not claim that my collection of "music, regardless of the delivery format" is superior to anyone else's style of music collection. I can certainly appreciate and even envy a fine collection of vinyl even though I don't have one.

You are probably right that AI is used to create a majority of fake videos but it is not behind most misinformation or fallacious reports. Let me give an example: recently I saw a meme on Facebook which falsely quoted the Chinese philosopher Chuang Tzu. Now in Chuang Tzu there is a story about a man dreaming he was a butterfly. But this meme which claimed to be a quote said a caterpillar thought its life was all over just before its metamorphosis. OK, so this is just false: there is no Chuang Tzu quote about a caterpillar. Dozens of people had shared this nonsense to their own FB pages. AI, which is to a great extent a creature of the web, could quite easily be used to detect this sort of bs. For example a web browser could have an extension which checks the extent of confirming documents. If this meme or article or variants of it is the only source for a claim, the extension could put a warning on it. Things that have already been extensively debunked by reliable sources could be marked, etc. Another example. A friend shared an article on FB which described Admiral Holsey calling out Trump at a meeting in front of various military bigwigs and Trump walking out. I knew that was fake and notified my friend because I read national papers every day and nobody had ever mentioned this business. When I checked, several places had debunked it too. Detecting this sort of thing is very easy to do with AI, imo. Even the fake videos could probably be quite easily detected and marked by AI.

One area where AI could potentially be very useful: debunking misinformation and viral fallacies on the web, social media, etc.

One of the things about IT is the technology never stands still. Years ago you had to code in assembler code, essentially a machine language. Later high level languages became a popular way to generate the same machine code. Later languages used on pc's emerged. And database systems. Then html and all its adjunct languages came about with the web. Thin clients, etc. All along the line you had to keep retraining yourself. AI is something of a revolution. I suppose eventually AI will be to IT as the industrial revolution was to manufacturing. At the moment it isn't quite there yet. We see temporary, transitional technical niches emerging where old style IT people babysit, check and tweak AI output. Eventually that stuff will go away as AI is better developed. At the moment everyone is looking at AI as a watershed moment similar to the web. I think it is similar in that right now there is an AI bubble, which like web investment and development will find a big correction. Companies are investing billions in data centers which will be obsolete in probably less than 10 years. Some of the development wrinkles will probably involve much lower power usage for AI and the abandonment of all these energy guzzling data centers. I do not expect the course of our love affair with AI to run smoothly. For somebody in IT now, the problem is pretty similar to previous tech changes: you have to keep learning new skills and roll with the punches.

Well, there is a recent Washington Post article which includes this: So the Post says "harper, a member of the cookers..." which is possibly where the misinformation started.

Someone who plays that venue after all the absurd things that have happened will suffer possibly greater reputational damage. But I still can't get over suing an artist for cancelling a free concert. This is supposed to be a center that patronizes and supports the arts and here they are suing an artist for a million bucks for not doing a free concert? Harrumph! With a sugar daddy like that it might be time to go on a diet.

Craft Records put out a remastered lp of this a few weeks ago. Today I noticed that presto now has the craft remaster as a cd quality download for $12.50. Went for it!

Apparently the Christmas Jazz Jam was a free event held on the Millenium Stage. So there was no revenue lost.

This is a somewhat elusive album in Joe Newman's catalog. Very tasty small group swing. It was originally issued on Jazztone as New Sounds in Swing. Also released as Byer's Guide by the Billy Byers Sextet. There was a Fresh Sounds CD of this, somewhat pricey and hard to find now. For now I'm listening to a cheap download from Apple Music.

The Inspector Alleyn Mysteries - free if you have Amazon Prime. This is a fun dramatization of Ngaio Marsh's detective novels. The setting has been moved from the 20's to the 40's but the overall look is slightly retro and the costumes, houses, interiors, villages, automobiles etc are beautifully authentic looking. Each program is movie length.

I have all the albums on Muse and 32Jazz cds but am still kicking myself for not buying the Mosaic. Hard to find and expensive now.

Don't you wish they had gotten some people who really know the music to give short talks about the various developments in jazz. And not Wynton Marsalis, who is knowledgeable and a good player but should be taken in micro-doses. Without getting too technical they could have gotten somebody like Dick Hyman to play the same thing as swing, vs bebop for example and show the characteristics and some of the nitty gritty of it. Instead we got non-musicians, enthusiastic but vague, going on about how great various players were. We have a notion they are great; tell us why.

One of the things Burns does is ask all interviewees certain leading questions and get them to answer in much the same way. This becomes the thread of his story and each of the interviews sort of confirms this thread. Never mind that it's shallow and maybe even wrong. In the jazz series he never really discusses what's different about this music, what's going on with each development, what's good about it, etc. It's all just glossy panning of old photos and shallow generalizations... and praise, lots of praise! Endless clips of various talking heads enthusing about some musician without any real attempt to explain why.