Tom Storer

Thanks for the tip. This is on my list for next month's emusic allowance. I've also created a thread like the one over at Jazz Corner: "Memorable quotes from posters," on which to list, uh, memorable quotes from posters. I was inspired to do this by Randy's "Byas could play the phone book if he played it real slow."

You don't know TBA? A fabulous bassist/drummer. You see him at all kinds of gigs.

I don't think excuses can be made for killing one's own children, but why do they have to be? Appreciating Rosolino's music is not the same thing as making excuses for his criminal acts. It just isn't. You can love the music and hate the musician's crimes. I don't understand why anyone would feel that one's condemnation of a criminal or other bad person must include condemnation, or at least refusal to accept, anything at all the person has ever done. I mean, Martin Luther King apparently plagiarized on some important thesis. What are we supposed to do, say, "Oh, that civil rights stuff, I don't know if I can get behind that now that I know he was a plagiarist. I can't make excuses for him"?

If a person writes a great fugue or plays a wonderful saxophone solo and murders his grandmother, how can you tell which act is "honest"? Perhaps both are: when he wrote the fugue he was honestly expressing some beautiful emotion, when he murdered his grandmother he was honestly expressing his violent rage. How can you tell where the honesty is in such acts? Also: why do you assume that nastiness and sublime art are contradictory? Perhaps someone could play a saxophone solo that expresses murderous rage and that impresses fans with its authenticity of feeling and beauty of form.

that I don't agree with. It seems to treat all these things as being of equal weight. I think we place far too much emphasis on artistic beauty - much more than it's really worth in society. The social benefits that musicians are supposed to provide for society are important but, it seems to me, only in terms of supporting other, more vital, facets of society, such as community unity of purpose, catharsis etc. All this stuff like aesthetics has, I feel, been made up as a result of the dominance of societies almost everywhere in the world by ruling classes, in order to bolster their sense of self-importance and their superiority over those ruled. So I feel that people who are violent or criminal provide social disbenefits that are entirely disproportionate to any benefits their music might provide. But I'm not talking about what art is "worth in society." That emphasis, and the implication of the phrase "the social benefits that musicians are supposed to provide for society" (supposed by whom?) is what leads, at its logical conclusion, to government-enforced "socialist realism," etc. Are artists motivated by "providing social benefits"? Not always, that's for sure. I'm not sure how to reconcile the notion that "stuff like aesthetics" is a ruling-class plot with the superb aesthetic mastery of so many artists who are not members of the ruling class--or rather, whose membership or non-membership in the ruling class does not determine their talent.

I can understand that knowledge of a musician's sins might make it impossible for you to listen to the music without thinking of the badness of the musician, or alternatively, that you might want to personally boycott a musician on account of the musician's badness, even if the music still moved you, in order to side with Good against Evil. But I don't feel that way myself. People are capable of good things and bad. In the case of a musician who makes beautiful music but is a hateful person, should the bad cancel out the good? I don't think so. The good--artistic beauty in this case--is what we need and should value in this world, and it seems paradoxical to negate the good in the name of condemning the bad. They both exist, each to be judged for itself. All of us have done things we're not proud of, things to be ashamed of. Does that mean the good things we do don't count? (That viewpoint doesn't really encourage evildoers to have a change of heart! You've been bad, so forget it, no point creating beauty for others--you're barred.) Nobody's all good or all bad. That works both ways--you don't have to forgive the hate or the compromise in order to love the good, just as you don't have to reject the beauty in order to condemn the ugliness, when all are part of the same person's life.

It does. And that Guillermo Klein is something else.

Thanks, Marla!

Do you know if WBGO makes archives available? There don't seem to be any on their site, or else I missed them. Live jazz radio from the States usually takes place at 3 or 4 AM for me, alas. EDIT - I found 'em. You have to click on the Blog link. But oops... when I click on "Listen to the show" for the Guillermo Klein concert from last night, I get a 45-second clip of the introduction, then nothing more. Oh well.

This gives me pause. I'll be interested to hear it. I'm predicting I'll prefer "Blue Skies," but we'll see.

Hiring freeze; travelling freeze.

I looked at your links on Adria and he doesn't seem to be doing chemistry-lab stuff at all, merely preparing ingredients in novel ways and combinations. Even "molecular gastronomy" is not mad-scientist stuff. It's just about understanding the physics of cooking in order to cook better. Adria and co. are just cooking unusual dishes--my impression is that it's more about saying, "this ingredient is the last thing you'd think of in a dessert, but if we prepare it a certain way and surround it with certain other things, it not only surprises the palate, but it works as a dessert," or "let's take this neutral ingredient, cook it and flavor/color it with some exotic fruit or vegetable, then cut it into long strips, dry it out, and serve it as a little crunchy starter snack. No one will even guess what it is!" (Entirely invented examples, but I think that's the approach.) But I do see your point that the general theme of surprising the palate is what Adria and co. share with miracle berry salesmen...

Nah, I respectfully disagree. On the one hand you have cooks who are artists, working with feverish inspiration to come up with surprising refinements, and on the other a berry that changes sour into sweet in your mouth, period. Which would you rather do, eat at this guy's restaurant or eat some goat's cheese and have it taste like a marshmallow?

I guess the attraction here is the weirdness of having your palate not work the way it usually does. Otherwise, what's the attraction of making cheese, Brussels sprouts or beer taste sugary?

Call me a reactionary, but I can't get with multimedia stuff. With rare exceptions, I prefer my arts one at a time. He's "only" seventy. What happened? I think he must have had some sort of health problems. A few years ago, it seems, he suddenly lost a lot of weight. Here's a photo from ten years ago (not flattering, but you can see that he was a beefy kind of guy): And here's the photo from his latest album: That album, by the way, is very nice indeed, with Lovano, McBride, and Watts. Lovano plays beautifully on it.

Salut, Guy!

50% Yankee. That kind of makes sense. I spent all of the US part of my life in the Northeast, but both my parents were from Kansas and I have some words and pronunciations I inherited from them.

Years ago, I had a pet. I named him Miles because he was a mean little black cat. Miles seemed to be lonely, so we got another cat to keep him company. It was a female cat, so naturally we named her Juliette Greco. The vet thought this was very strange, even after I explained. However, it didn't work out. Juliette Greco used to beat Miles up. We gave her to the Arab grocer across the street and she had a happy life as a mouser.

If you mean "ever had a relationship that was a big mistake," yes, in a way, in that we proved to be incompatible. On the other hand, we were young, and one's first "big" relationship is often a mistake, but a crucial one in that, if you're smart or lucky or both, you learn enough about yourself and others to know better the next time around. Some mistakes you need to make.

My condolences, Larry. I find that I have a similar reaction to recorded music when I'm depressed for whatever reason. As a matter of fact that's often how I realize I'm depressed--it's the signal that I've reached a certain low point. Luckily it doesn't happen too often. I'm not sure I have the same intepretation of it that you do, i.e. that it's the recorded-ness of it that is a problem. For me, in any case, I think it has more to do with a kind of refusal of pleasure, the kind of pleasure that is sensual, imaginative, creative. When I'm in that kind of a period I don't want to go out much, either. They say depression is rage turned inward. Denying oneself, not consciously but effectively, a happy pleasure that normally takes one out of oneself might be part of that dynamic. BWTFDIK? In general, though, I listen to much less music than I once used to. When I had to give up my iPod to save my hearing, that took away my commute-time listening, which was most of my listening time. I've never really been able to find a substitute for it. Surprisingly, it doesn't bother me that much, either. But when music sounds empty and unattractive to me because I'm depressed, I hate the feeling.

If you're not interested in gut-level anti-Americanism coupled with starry-eyed idealization of America, all at the same time, you wouldn't like it.

Come to Paris and wing it. It would never work out and you'd end up going back, but you would always have Paris.

It's a good one, all right. Now available from eMusic, incidentally!

Chris, do I understand correctly that you are impugning the man's veracity?

Listen to all of Miles's legit releases back to back? Not even in France do we have that much time off. But seriously, I don't know if I could do it. Miles's music is very beautiful and very intense but that much intensity demands relief. I'd need to take regular breaks to listen to something a little more light-hearted.