Tom Storer

I suppose this is as good a place as any to ask my question: does anybody know how to grab excerpts of video in AVI format from a DVD? People seem to do this all the time in order to post said excerpts on YouTube but I haven't a clue what software they use or anything.

French-speakers such as those in Belgium pronounce it jasPAR, but they also pronounce his first name buhBEE. So you can either go the francophone route and say buhBEE jasPAR, or else you can pretend you're an English speaker and say BOBby JASpar. (Even with English stress, you ought to say Jaspar and not Jasper.) And as BillF notes, that's a soft J in French.

He's back! Check out the upcoming shows list on the MySpace page of French pianist Baptiste Trotignon: Turner will be playing three concerts with him, along with Tom Harrell, in March. I'll be seeing them at the New Morning in Paris on March 10. Another concert with Trotignon is scheduled in France in May. Trotignon has a new album out on Naive Records called "Share," with Turner, Harrell, Matt Penman on bass, and Eric Harland or Otis Brown III on drums. They're touring (with French bass & drums) in support of the album.

- Baptiste Trotignon, "Share": Trotignon, piano; Matt Penman, bass; Eric Harland or Otis Brown III, drums; on certain tracks: Mark Turner, tenor sax; Tom Harrell, flugelhorn. - Joshua Redman, "Compass": Redman with two bassists (Larry Grenadier and Reuben Rogers) and two drummers (Brian Blade and Gregory Hutchinson). They go from trio tracks to quartet tracks (one drummer, two bassists) to quintet tracks with everybody. I thought I'd go mainstream and see what's up. Both are very nice records on first listen.

One way to reduce the deficit.

Jarrett and his bloody solo concerts. Stay in the barn, Keith. I once wrote a review of a Jarrett solo concert recording.

Whenever I read a Grisham book I appreciate the fact that he's a skilled writer. His prose is deft and relatively graceful. That's not at all true of many best-seller authors (Dan Brown being only the most egregious of a bad lot). That said, the content is not always memorable. I'm reading Michael Chabon's "The Yiddish Policeman's Union" right now--now there's a real writer, with imagination and originality as well as serious chops.

Are you employed at SAP? Yes, as of last year when they swallowed up the company I've been at for the last ten years. This is one of those maddening situations: we saved their bacon and simultaneously endangered their stock. Our company, that SAP bought, buoyed SAP's 2008 turnover significantly. Without the acquisition they would have had a much worse year in terms of sales. However, since we had been operating with a lower profit margin than SAP's (which is very high), the acquisition mechanically lowered SAP's margin--which is bad for the stock price. That and the present crisis triggered the layoffs.

Getting laid off is tough news in the best of times. I wish all the best to those of you who are out of work. My employer has announced 3000 layoffs worldwide in the coming year; no one knows where the axe will all. Fingers crossed.

Iverson's discussion was a discussion of Tristano, about the musician, not about what has happened in the last 10-20 years. He had thoughts about that particular aspect of music and how it was operating in Tristano's time, so he wrote it up. What you seem to be saying is that he shouldn't have written that article, he should have written another one.

That's the kind of insider detail that makes Organissimo indispensable!

Whenever and wherever there's leeway for people to take advantage of a system, they will. In Europe, this means that people who really are sick can take sick leave for it not based on how many days they are arbitrarily allowed, but on whether or not they're sick. It also means slackers and malingerers will game the system. In a tougher system, slackers and malingerers won't be able to get away with it, but people who are sick will be more likely to go to work anyway for fear of being thought a slacker or malingerer, or because they've used up their "sick days" already. Personally, I prefer to let honest people get proper allowance for sickness, even though others will cheat, rather than make it really hard to cheat even though that will end up screwing the honest sick.

Just watched that "Cherokee" solo and found it terribly boring. He's played that tune a million times, it's just a crowd-pleaser; he sounded to me like he was on auto-pilot. Once upon a time he had Tain Watts, Marcus Roberts and Robert Hurst behind him and they'd play pretty interesting things together with a vibe of friendly competition and trying to find new things to play for each other. Now he's just performing it as a circus act. Wynton's solos never have memorable melodic invention. That's my impression, anyway.

Ratliff was born in 1968. In 1984 he would have been 16. When I was 16, in Westchester, right next door to Rockland County, live jazz was certainly available to me. Me and my pals would go to jazz clubs in Manhattan and were never carded. But maybe things had changed in the ten years separating me from Ratliff, age-wise, or maybe his family moved away earlier than that.

I've given up. I buy a CD now and then, sporadically and on a whim, but I no longer have a must-buy list, or even try to keep up with what's new. I have so much stuff already that I need to listen to more, not to mention emusic downloads that I haven't even gotten around to listening to yet!

Where should I start? Can somebody make a list of Donald Westlake's greatest?

Without even stopping to read the article, I must contribute (perhaps not for the first time) this classic: You say Carmeena, I say Carm-eye-na, You say Burayna, I say Burahna, Carmeena, Carm-eye-na, Burayna, Burahna, Let's Carl the whole thing Orff!

Edward R. Tufte's "Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative." Wonderful discussions of the visual design of information display.

Those lyrics sound great when Sheila Jordan sings them on their studio ECM album, "Playground." Seriously. She also does "The Zoo." That's a fantastic record.

Good points, John.

And precisely what Wynton is not about. My impression is that he feels he owns the truth about jazz (which I think he learned from Albert Murray and Crouch and committed to memory) and about its relationship to the black American experience, and his mission is to spread the word. He is not interested in having open discussions that challenge his hard-won preconceptions, especially with people who are not famous and celebrated. If you had won a Nobel Prize, appeared regularly on NPR, or been an arts establishment insider for decades, I think he would have debated with you much more readily. I suspect that he filters out the hoi-polloi, as does Crouch.

That's much the impression I have of Wynton - that he has deep and sincere convictions that are on the order of religious beliefs. He is willing to be open to the sinners who disagree with him (as long as he has the pulpit) but not for a minute to the sin of their disagreement. And not, I think, just because they disagree and he hates to have people disagree with him. I think it's because of the nature of the disagreement - you can't disagree with him about jazz and not expect him to take it as heresy. He will talk for four hours to Ethan Iverson, an especially diplomatic person by all accounts, because Iverson is not challenging him, but deferentially asking questions, bringing up a variety of things and letting Wynton express himself. When you, Allen, try to criticize his views, then it's get thee behind me, Satan! It's kind of like if you had a priest or minister in your community who was warm and kind, generous with his time and energy, ran the soup kitchen, helped the poor and was a true spiritual leader to his congregation. If you sat down with him to talk about your religious doubts and your sins, you'd have all his attention and benefit from his godly advice, freely dispensed. That's kind of like Iverson interviewing Marsalis. But if you said, "C'mon, all this superstition about supreme beings and stuff - you don't mean to say you believe in all that guff, do you?" Or try to convert him to Islam. That's kind of like you, Allen, interviewing Marsalis. Or so I imagine. It's interesting what you noted about the anti-intellectual reaction vs. the commitment to education. Over at that other jazz board, a couple of years ago there was a thread about Crouch in which Crouch actually participated. He was distinctly authoritarian, in that his sole defense against criticism was to say "famous figures in the arts have praised me, that is the proof that I am great." And that was really it. Marsalis reflects that influence somewhat, being, as far as I can tell, wholly dedicated to a nostalgic worship of the accomplishments of older generations and dismissive of any effort to wrest attention away from their example. "They are great, we must strive to be like them. That is how we can be great. End of story." His educational efforts are all about exposing children to classic jazz and its heroes, and teaching people how to play - fine efforts to be sure. He's opposed to rank ignorance and incompetence, as are we all, I hope, but in favor of imposing "the canon" and defending it against all reassessment.

Allen, do you think you'll ever eat lunch in New York again? That whole series of articles Iverson did - the interview and the stuff on the Young Lions of the 80's, etc. - is very interesting, perhaps especially for us old folks who lived through it.

Kuhn did some very nice live trio albums with Ron Carter and Al Foster: - The Vanguard Date (Owl, 1986) - Life's Magic (Blackhawk, 1986 - from the same Vanguard concert) - Live at Birdland (Blue Note, 2007) I also like a 1995 duo with Steve Swallow, Two by 2, on Sunny Side if it's still in print.

On Saturday I saw Sheila Jordan with a very good Paris rhythm section of Frank Avitabile, piano; Thomas Bramerie, bass; Aldo Romano, drums. Sheila is 80 years old and is still great! She sang with wit and energy, spontaneity and swing, her voice as expressive as ever and still under her deft control. Hippest singer on earth (well, her and Andy Bey). Go and see her if you get the chance, it's not too late!