Tom Storer

Yeah, the J. Redman trio thing is sumptuously recorded, impeccably played, as earnest as possible, and a complete snooze.

I saw a similar band in a theater outside Paris (Boulogne-Billancourt, to be exact), but with a slightly different personnel. I recall Lacy, Woods, Sickler, Yochko Seffer, not sure of the trombone, and the core was Sphere: Barron, Williams and Riley as the rhythm section and Rouse on tenor sax. The opener was Lacy playing Monk songs solo. A memorable evening. My favorite of the Waldron/Lacy duos was the Dreher, maybe because I was in attendance on a couple of nights. It was cool living in Paris during the Lacy years.

I just hope they find a cure for Alzheimer's before it's my turn.

The URL didn't work (I got a message saying it was "malformed") but I searched for Nibiru. Oh, I believe it. Absolutely. They couldn't put it on Youtube if it wasn't true!

1 to point out that if light bulbs are affordable at all, it's no thanks to the Bush Administration, which did its level best help the light bulb industry jack up prices to screw consumers and make the rich richer. 1 to point out that Hillary Clinton is bought and paid for by the light bulb lobby, that Obama fudges the issue, and that Al Gore wastes electricity. 12 to turn the thread into a Republican vs. Democrat flame war.

My condolences, Flurin. Our cat died a couple of years ago at age 14 from feline diabetes. Always tough to lose a pet. Incidentally, nouns don't have a gender in English. The word "cat" is neither masculine nor feminine, you just say "he" or "she" depending on the gender of the individual animal.

I had the same reaction.

Goody, that's a student. And I notice she's wearing the "G" for Goodspeak pendant popular among your harem, so don't play dumb.

Hey, I'd take the poll! But I'd lie.

I went through it several times, supplying alternate answers to my truthful ones to find out why my cadaver would only be worth a measly $3825. Turns out it's the drinking, age, poor eyesight, and baldness. If I didn't drink at all (as opposed to a couple of drinks a day), I'd be worth $4500, a jump of $675. If I were between 13 and 20 years old, as opposed to 41-55, I'd be worth $4300, a jump of $475. If I had perfect eyesight, instead of very poor vision, I'd be worth $4225, a jump of $550 (despite the red wine and the wrinkles). If I had hair below the shoulders, instead of being bald, I'd be worth $4450, a jump of $625, even if I were still a blind old drunk. And if I were an adolescent, long-haired tee-totaler with 20-20 vision, I'd be worth $6000!

Thanks for all this Lockjaw talk, folks, it's given me the urge to revisit. Incidentally, eMusic has a good twenty or so Lockjaw recordings among its offerings...

When my nephew was three he was traumatized when Christmas was all over and done with and the tree was stripped of its decorations and unsentimentally junked. He had become emotionally attached to it and wept bitter tears. The next year my brother bought a fake tree so the kid could put it safely in its box after Christmas and say goodbye to it for another year. Heart-warming, but since then they've been stuck with a fake tree. I buy a real tree at the florist's down the street. I love having a Christmas tree up with the lights blinking. If the lights don't blink, it's not a Christmas tree as far as I'm concerned.

OK, so the younger sister is a TV star. I'd just been seeing headlines saying she was pregnant and thought she was only newsworthy because of her sister. But she's a TV star. I'll try to work up an opinion on this matter, then. On second thought... no.

I have a similar experience to Jim's--my son has his own firm tastes which don't fit any particular profile but his own, and he listens to the details. So I figure I must have raised him right, since music is a source of pleasure and discovery for him, despite the fact that he "hates jazz" and listens to all kinds of stuff I find unlistenable. What you basically have to accept is that your children's taste in music is none of your damn business.

As slogans go, this is a great one! Worth printing on T-shirts!

Yup. But not just the iPod--I've been using portable audio devices of one sort or another since the days of the Sony Walkman for audio cassettes. Always with earplugs, I find over-the-ear headphones inconvenient. So it was a long and gradual slide, and I hasten to say that I don't have serious impairment of hearing, just somewhat accelerated loss in the upper frequencies in relation to my age. Basically, the doctor said, "Nip this in the bud or you'll be sorry." So I did.

You sound like too much of a cold hardliner! Life is life, people take risks, sometimes they fail. People who have grown old or ill sometimes can't bow out gracefully, for whatever reasons. As fans you take risks, too--who knows if the concert you're going to next week will be a revelation or a flop? Sure, on a professional level, you can criticize musicians for being unprepared; as a disappointed fan, you can be angry that you didn't get enough enjoyment for your dollar. But big deal, really. I'm just speaking for myself, but the sort of consumerist indignation you express doesn't have much to do with how I feel about music. The generosity and vulnerability that performing artists demonstrate (regardless of the fact that they're getting paid for it) merits generosity on our part, too. I agree with you, though, that critics have every right to report disappointing concerts accurately.

Many are the trails I have discovered and travelled down based on comments from people here, and many are the deep thoughts, fruitful reflections, little-known facts, and assumption-challenging, horizon-opening notions that I have benefited from encountering here. A message board is only ever as good as the people participating in it. Organissimo has a unique combination of individuals who are smart, funny, knowledgeable and quirky, but the sum is greater than the parts, since there's also a group dynamic that gets all those insights flowing out of people's minds and into the pixels on screen. Long may Organissimo live!

Stockhausen's son Marcus plays trumpet and records for ECM. Meanwhile, a friend of mine sent me this quote from "The Rest is Noise" about Stockhausen: "Henry Flynt (one of the downtown hipsters of the New York 60s scene) once picketed a 1964 Stockhausen concert as, by that time, the German avant-gardist was considered a reactionary, establishment figure. Flynt's slogan: 'STOCKHAUSEN - PATRICIAN THEORIST OF WHITE SUPREMACY: GO TO HELL.'". Nothing like a bit of perspective, eh?

I rarely feel the need to listen to Mel Tormé, and all I have by him are some Concords that I got from eMusic, sitting on my hard disk. But when I do listen to him, I always enjoy it. When someone can sing that well, it's hard for me to hold his hipster thing against him. On the other hand, Mark Murphy and Kurt Elling give me the creeps. I think Tormé just has better taste.

I think we need to define "flirt". If flirting just means to playfully demonstrate that you find someone attractive and wouldn't mind them finding you attractive, without any intention to follow through, then yes, I flirt sometimes. If I ever got the sense that the other person thought I was seriously hitting on them, I would stop. My wife doesn't hesitate to harmlessly flirt, either. Sometimes we end up making each other jealous this way, and that's not necessarily a bad thing either, since it can lead to memorable reconciliations. Flirting can help you remember not to take each other for granted!

I plan to start listening to music again. Of course, I haven't stopped listening altogether. Here's what happened: I get home from work usually around 7:30, cook dinner (my wife gets home later than I do so I've become the cook), then we eat dinner, then do the dishes. This brings us up to 9 PM at the earliest. Then my wife and I sit and talk about our days, often there are then practical matters to tend to over correspondence or the computer... plus I try to go to bed early, 11 or earlier if I can. So I rarely have any time in the evening to sit and listen. Therefore I used my iPod--a 35-40 minute commute to and from the office gave me 70 or 80 minutes of uninterrupted listening time per day. Then I had a hearing test about 11 months ago, and the doctor told me to give up that iPod at once--incipient hearing loss. And I did, from one day to the next. This left me completely nonplussed. I just sort of gave up, and now I can go for a week at a time without listening to any music whatsoever. But it has to stop. I'm going to rearrange my life somehow so that I can listen to music daily.

Just read that article today--very interesting. I'm thinking I might go vegetarian again. Did it once and backslid--I have no lofty moral principles about eating meat (or about anything, for that matter) but hey, it's cheaper to be a vegetarian!

I have it, and it's very good indeed! Good diversity of content, great sound, great music. Real roots jazz. I recommend it. Keep it on your wish list!

P.S. On JC, the "fixed" ruse as shown above is often used to hilarious effect. I believe it was invented by Larry Nagel.