GA Russell

I would like to hear that story.

I hope you mean Whitey Herzog!

The Adventures of Superman - The Complete Second Season (5 DVDs) - $4.49 http://www.amazon.com/Adventures-Superman-Complete-Second-Season/dp/B000BT96FA/ref=pd_cp_d_2

Lenny Walls has agree to a restructured contract with the Eskimos. http://www.tsn.ca/cfl/story/?id=368589

I saw Cornell Gunther in Washington in 1972 I think. Maybe it was 1975. Since then I thought that he was the lead singer.

Jim, if memory is relevant, then I suspect that is the culprit, because I have very little of it. Tom, the price is going up because my first year is ending. The original deal was $10 per month off for the first 12 months. But looking around, I don't see anything in this area that matches that speed, so I guess I will have to swallow the extra ten dollars. I am happy with the Time Warner service - It's only the price I am thinking of.

I believe that my internet service will increase $10 a month next month. I use Time Warner Roadrunner. My current download speed is 17,106 kbps. My upload speed is 956 kbps. So I am shopping. The others rate their speeds as Mbps. So what is 17,106 kbps in Mbps terms? 17.1? I have trouble downloading videos like YouTube in real time. I need to start play, then pause, let the data accumulate, and then play and watch the video. What speed would I need to watch YouTube without doing that?

Well, I note that the link shows a region-free Toshiba Blu-Ray player on sale for $149. That's pretty good for a Blu-Ray player, isn't it? http://www.regioncodefreedvd.com/Region_Free_Blu_ray_dvd_players.html

Unk, I visited the Bay Area in August of 1973, and took in an A's game! What I remember most about the game was how uncomfortably cool it was for a baseball game, and this was in August! I'm surprised they get a lot of people to show up in that climate, but I guess the natives are used to it.

Art Pepper - Blues for the Fisherman (4CDs) - $27.50 http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/artpepper13

The Lone Ranger - Seasons 1 & 2 (13 DVDs) - $16.99 http://www.amazon.com/Lone-Ranger-75th-Anniversary-Seasons/dp/B001DJ7Q0E/ref=pd_ys_qtk_general_recs_4?pf_rd_p=1286318242&pf_rd_s=center-1&pf_rd_t=1501&pf_rd_i=home&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_r=1GR616AB147ZYK8KH5WB

Jim's post got me thinking. During my childhood, I thought that my favorite team was the Minnesota Twins with Harmon Killebrew, Camilo Pascual, et al. But looking back, I think that I actually was more of a Boston Patriots fan because I liked the AFL regardless of who was announcing the games, while I didn't like baseball after they took Dizzy Dean off. So...who was the one team of your childhood, and do you still root for them today? By the way, in the case of the Twins, I lost all interest in them when the players of the early 60s retired. In the case of the Patriots, my love decreased some when they changed their name to New England, and decreased a lot more when they changed their uniforms to blue with Elvis on the helmet.

ejp, is the typical computer DVD player regionalized or region-free? PS - Look what I found! http://www.regionfreedvd.net/

I'll make an ignorant guess - Irene Kral?

MSE is active. Malwarebytes is passive i.e. you have to manually scan your system for it to be effective. Simply having Malwarebytes will not protect you from anything. You have to open it, update it & make do a "Full scan" to get the full protection it offers. Kevin, although Malwarebytes' free program is passive, I believe that that paid program which I have is active. But maybe you understand it better than I do.

She looks to me like one of the twin backup singers with The Shangri-Las.

Kevin, I already have and use Malwarebytes, and it doesn't get any adware that I can tell. PS - Do you want me to use Security Essential s and Malwarebytes simultaneously?

Definitely run Malwarebytes. I bought Malwarebytes recently, but I don't understand it. I have it running on my machine, and it frequently says that it is blocking sites which attempt to access my computer. It is the only anti-virus program I have on my computer. Am I supposed to be running another anti-virus program in addition to it?

I have been using the free version of eTrust PestPatrol which the computer repairman put onto my machine to eliminate adware. It said that I have four viruses, if that's the word, which it will not remove, and that I would need their pay-for program to remove them. So I wonder, if I am going to pay for an adware blocker/remover, which is the best? And which is the best freeware program? Any suggestions?

Happy Birthday Kevin!

June 7th has come and gone, and Live at Birdland is now available to everyone in the US. I received this press release about it today. Lee Konitz/Brad Mehldau/Charlie Haden/Paul Motian Live At Birdland Lee Konitz; alto saxphone Brad Mehldau: piano Charlie Haden: double-bass Paul Motian: drums U.S. Release date: June 7, 2011 ECM CD: B0015764-02 UPC: 6025 277 4616 6 “This week,” reported the New York Times in December 2009, “Birdland has booked an ad hoc quartet with three eminences and a great younger player. (…) It’s going to be a week of soft anarchy, a gig without preparation or rehearsal, despite the presence of recording microphones for a couple of evenings. The jazz musician’s trust in the present moment is elevated nearly to worship among this group’s elders, all of whom, one way or another, were in on the early stages of loosening up rhythm and structure in jazz.” On this live recording from New York’s legendary club, an ensemble of history-making players dives into the music without a set list. Four exceptional jazz musicians –Lee Konitz, Brad Mehldau, Charlie Haden and Paul Motian – approach the standards from new perspectives and unusual angles. They play them with freedom, tenderness and a melodic and rhythmic understanding found only amongst jazz’s greatest improvisers. The recording was made at Birdland and mixed by Manfred Eicher and the quartet, with James Farber as engineer, at New York’s Avatar Studios. Songs selected by this team from the performances of December 9 and 10, 2009, are: “Lover Man”, “Lullaby Of Birdland”, “Solar”, “I Fall In Love Too Easily”, “You Stepped Out Of A Dream” and “Oleo”. Konitz has often said that he tries to play the material as if encountering it for the first time. With all four musicians listening intently, discoveries are continually made in the music. “Lover Man”, the ballad strongly associated with Billie Holiday (but also, for instance, with Lee Konitz and Gerry Mulligan at Newport) makes an arresting opening track, with the uniquely melancholic cry of Lee’s alto sax to the fore. Mehldau’s solo gives immediate notice of his architectural intelligence as a player, and in his subtle comping he continually builds bridges between the idiosyncratic playing styles of his associates. Haden’s bass solo is characteristically soulful, Motian’s deft brushes perfectly placed. “Lullaby Of Birdland”, composed in 1952, acquires additional poignancy through the recent death of its composer, George Shearing. (Lee Konitz, now 83, is said to be the only living jazz soloist to have played all of the diverse addresses of the Birdland club, starting in 1949.) The piece is driven here by the marvellous rhythmic interplay of Haden and Motian, their near-telepathic understanding honed long ago during their decade-plus association with Keith Jarrett in the 1960s and 70s. “Solar” begins with an abstract clarion call from Konitz. “Mr. Konitz, with a piece of fabric stuffed into the bell of his horn to mute it, started playing Miles Davis’s ‘Solar’ and Mr. Motian joined in, followed by the others. A skeletal groove emerged…”, wrote Ben Ratliff in the NY Times. Mehldau’s solo is a marvel of invention, lifted up by the waves of Motian’s wayward drums. “I Fall In Love Too Easily” is a touching rendition of the Jule Styne ballad (a song first intoned by Frank Sinatra in 1945) with fine outlining of the melody by Mehldau, and Konitz almost Ornette-like in his phrasing. The singing quality of the performance is extended in Haden’s heartfelt solo. “You Stepped Out Of a Dream” was previously recorded by Konitz, Mehldau and Haden for a Blue Note trio album 1997: the powerful presence of Paul Motian on the present recording transforms it completely. Sonny Rollins’s “Oleo” is given one of the freest performances of the set, beginning with a beautifully elastic Konitz/Motian duet. Brad Mehldau has commented on the performance’s cool chromaticism, allied to the rhythmic phrasing of bebop, until the tune is deconstructed in the final moments of collective soloing. When these musicians play the standards, they do indeed make them new. * All of these musicians have some previous ECM history. Paul Motian’s considerable ECM discography as leader of his own groups includes a series of highly acclaimed albums by the trio with Bill Frisell and Joe Lovano, as well as a recent recording in trio with Jason Moran and Chris Potter, Lost In A Dream. Motian has also drummed on a wide range of other albums for ECM – with Paul Bley and Gary Peacock, Enrico Rava, Bobo Stenson, Arild Andersen, Marilyn Crispell, and more. Haden’s and Motian’s associations with ECM go back almost to the beginning of the label’s history. Haden’s first ECM appearance was in 1972, as a contributor to Motian’s Conception Vessel, Paul’s first album as a leader. Both men recorded for ECM with Keith Jarrett’s American Quartet (the epic Survivors’ Suite and Eyes of the Heart). Haden’s also been heard on ECM with Pat Metheny, Denny Zeitlin, Carla Bley, and the much-loved Magico trio with Jan Garbarek and Egberto Gismonti. He’s also led his own large ensemble on Ballad of the Fallen (also with Paul Motian). Last year, after a longer absence, he returned to the label for Jasmine, a series of duets with Keith Jarrett. Mehldau played on a pair of Charles Lloyd discs, The Water Is Wide and Hyperion With Higgins, drawn from an inspired session in December 1999, and Konitz contributed to Kenny Wheeler’s classic Angel Song in 1996. I've been enjoying Faithful very much as well. I think I like January better, but Faithful is great for a quiet Sunday afternoon. The Marcin Wasilewski Trio is currently wrapping up its European tour: Dortmund May 19 Bielsko-Biala, Bielskie Centrum May 27 Coutance , France, Jazz Sous Les Pommiers May 31 Here's a press release about Faithful I received when it was issued. Marcin Wasilewski Trio Faithful Marcin Wasilewski: piano Slawomir Kurkiewicz: double-bass Michal Miskiewicz: drums U.S. Release date: April 12, 2011 ECM CD: B0015391-02 UPC: 6025 275 9105 6 “Marcin Wasilewski does not think like other jazz pianists, His improvisational underpinning, his sense of musical space and his aural imagery are so fresh they are initially mysterious, then get more so. The same can be said of his trio as a whole with bassist Slawomir Kurkiewicz and drummer Michal Miskiewicz…It takes nerve for a young trio to create music of such stillness, such patience. The fact that the three have played together since they were teenagers is audible in the way they trust the epiphanies they collectively come upon.” - Thomas Conrad, JazzTimes Continuing directions sketched on 2007’s January, and the earlier album called just Trio (2004), Faithful is the third ECM album by Poland’s Wasilewski Trio. Their ECM discography also includes a further three albums as members of the Tomasz Stanko Quartet: Soul of Things, Suspended Night and Lontano, recorded between 2001 and 2005. Furthermore, pianist Marcin Wasilewski and bassist Slawomir Kurkiewicz are featured on Manu Katché’s Neighbourhood and Playground albums of 2004 and 2007. Nonetheless, it is to the trio that the listener must turn for the most comprehensive account of the players’ capabilities and inspirations. And Faithful may be the most comprehensive album yet from this group, capturing the trio’s admixture of energy, lyricism and ideas. The album opens strikingly with Hanns Eisler’s “An den kleinen Radioapparat”, a song written (in 1942) from the perspective of a German exile still pursued and haunted by the voices of his persecutors through the medium of the radio. The tune’s had a latter-day revival under the title “The Secret Marriage”, but the Wasilewski Trio reach for a feeling closer to the piece’s original intention. “Night Train To You” is the first of five new Wasilewski tunes here, described by the composer as “a motoric piece, a process.” At the outset, three chords set up a pattern, “like a loop.” Time signatures progress from 6/8 to 11/8. A “very simple melody” takes us to a solo sequence for piano and drums, before the piece slows like a locomotive approaching a station, leading to a final section with improvisations around the chords heard in the open moments. Faithful takes its name from its title track, a tune originally from Ornette Coleman’s 1966 album The Empty Foxhole, long a reference at ECM for the clarity of its melodic line and the purity, the innocence, of its improvisation. In an indirect way, it can be related to the history of Wasilewski, Kurkiewicz and Miskiewicz, players who found their shared musical identity when just schoolchildren. Their trio has been in existence since the mid 1990s, and the three musicians have made their discoveries in jazz together. Marcin’s tune “Mosaic” is patterned like its title, a musical mosaic, with moving and fragmented chords painting a larger picture. “Ballad of the Sad Young Men”, now a jazz standard, was written by Tommy Wolf and Fran Landesmann for the Beat Generation musical The Nervous Set in 1959. Hermeto Pascoal’s “Oz Guizos” (The Bells) was brought to the session by bassist Slawomir Kurkiewicz, who counts Brazilian music amongst his inspirations. “Slawomir brought a bunch of Pascoal tunes to rehearsal and we ran them through. This one seemed to speak most clearly to the character of our group.” “Song for Swirek” is a tribute to the trio’s close friend Marek Swierkowski. The dreamlike “Woke up in the Desert” was named by Marcin’s friend, Polish rock singer/songwriter Edyta Bartosiewcz. “Every time we have a new recording session, I go over to her place and I like to listen to the music with her. I respect her opinion very much and she’s great at finding titles. This title still makes me laugh, but it also works on the imagination. It seems to suggest all kinds of associations.” (Henri Rousseau’s “Sleeping Gypsy” might come to mind, perhaps.) Marcin points out, furthermore, the snakelike movement and sonorities of Michael Miskiewicz’s cymbals and snare. Paul Bley’s ”Big Foot” (a.k.a. “Figfoot”) was heard one of the very first of ECM’s releases, Paul Bley With Gary Peacock, issued in 1970. In the present version, its dryly witty twists and turns are more characteristically Bley-like than its romping energy. Finally there’s “Lugano Lake”, named for the site of the recording, made with producer Manfred Eicher at Lugano’s Auditorium SRI. “It’s a fond memory of a beautiful town, with the lake and the mountain, and sums up for me, the feeling of being there, in a recording.”

I received this press release today about Craig Taborn, his new album Avenging Angel, and his touring. Craig Taborn solo concerts: June 16 Baltimore, MD An Die Musik Live! June 17 New York, NY The Rubin Museum Avenging Angel, a powerful, creative and rigorously uncompromising album, is the first unaccompanied solo disc in Craig Taborn’s discography as well as the first ECM recording issued under his name. The album was recorded in the exceptional acoustic of the recital room at Lugano’s Studio RSI, with Manfred Eicher producing. The disc follows several distinguished ‘sideman’ appearances for ECM, including three Roscoe Mitchell albums – Nine To Get Ready, Composition / Improvisation Nos. 1, 2 & 3 and the recent Far Side – as well as Michael Formanek’s The Rub and Spare Change, Evan Parker’s Boustrophedon and David Torn’s Prezens. Taborn (born 1970) has been widely-valued for his resourcefulness as an improviser, in and out of the jazz tradition, since the early 1990s, when his work with saxophonist James Carter’s groups drew the attention of musicians, press and listeners alike. His own groups have since explored a range of options, and he’s also been at the forefront of experiments cross referencing jazz and electronics. In this regard his 2004 album Junk Magic (on the Thirsty Ear label), has been cited as a pioneering work, and Craig has repeatedly been voted #1 Rising Star Keyboardist in the DownBeat Critics Poll. In the last few years, however, solo piano performance has become a priority for Craig Taborn. “If the areas of improvisation that I deal with are always ‘compositional’ in a certain sense, in this case a very focussed compositional approach is applied, rather than allowing a broader exploration to yield a result. Throughout this recording I’m honing in on specific details. The music is really improvised: I just start. But having started, I try to relate everything that happens, like the motivic or rhythmic and textural detail, to the initial ideas as closely as I can. In terms of my own playing I try to have things emerge from the musical material itself. And a lot of that can depend on the instrument, too [in Lugano, a Steinway D]: the sound of the piano itself and what it is generating. I’m interested in the history of piano music, certainly, but I’m not hearing the instrument quite in those terms. I’m experiencing it also as a pure sound source, very aware of the tones and the overtones and how the instrument is ringing. This music is not about ‘transcending the piano’ as much as it is about working with what is possible within it. ” Amongst the album’s striking characteristics is the way in which Taborn balances density of sound-events and structural clarity. “I like transparency and I like the details to be clear. But I also like layering the sounds: I like a complex palette, multiple voices, multiple rhythms, but I also want to be able to discern things, including all the spectral details that come up. ” Craig Taborn is on tour in May in Europe and June in the US playing solo concerts in the spirit of Avenging Angel. 2011 is set to be a busy year for the pianist, and the solo concert periods alternate with European and North American tours with the Michael Formanek Quartet.

Amazon/Newbury now has more in at the $9.99 price. http://www.amazon.com/Debut-Records-Story-Various-Artists/dp/B000000XB7/ref=sr_1_1?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1307747753&sr=1-1

Remington Steele - Season 1 (4 DVDs) - $11.79 http://www.amazon.com/Remington-Steele-Season-Stephanie-Zimbalist/dp/B00096S45S/ref=sr_1_1?s=dvd&ie=UTF8&qid=1307742769&sr=1-1 The first season of Remington Steele was classic television IMO. The writer Glen Gordon Caron joined about episode 5. Unfortunately, the ratings were dismal. Instead of cancelling the show, they dumbed it down for the remainder of its run, and it became fairly popular! Caron left after that one year to create and enjoy success with Moonlighting. Thanks - I love The Prisoner, but have only faint memories of the German synchronisation of Danger Man in my teens - I will get me a copy later this month. Available in Germany for a similar price. Fifteen years ago I saw the show dubbed in French in Quebec. It was called Destination: Danger. I hadn't realized till then how important McGoohan's voice was to the appeal of the character. The French guy sounded like a nerd!

We don't want no stinkin' NFL team... Interesting that three of the five teams used to be located in LA.