Robert J

I saw him in Detroit and Windsor several times when I was in high school and University in the mid 80s. I guess I was lucky to even have spoken with him. The drummer in my band and I were checking out his drum kit at the break in this small Windsor club. And he explained his setup to us. He had this device, where he had these flexible tubes running into his toms, and possibly the bass drum. The tubes were attached to a breathing apparatus so he could change the pitch as he played by exerting more or less air into the tubes from his mouth. It made for really interesting solos and I never heard anything like that (or since). He also played the saw quite creatively too. Search out The Free Slave or Duet in Detroit if you want to hear his power. Unfortunately in the last few years, Roy had some severe setbacks due to a bi-polar disorder. You can read it here, as it is sad for me to describe. http://www.metrotimes.com/editorial/story.asp?id=2746 http://www.metrotimes.com/editorial/story.asp?id=7070

I wonder what that tasted like. ← Peruvian pepper tree, sterile (Sch. molle) Plant family Anacardiaceae (cashew family) Sensory quality Sweet and aromatic, similar to juniper (which makes a good substitute, though it is far more intensive). Main constituents Mostly monoterpene hydrocarbons (together about 10% of the mass of the dried berries): 21% ?3-carene, 20% a-pinene, 13% a-phellandrene, 9% limonene, 8% p-cymene and 6% ß-phellandrene. Furthermore, monoterpene, sequiterpene and triterpene derivatives were reported: cis-sabinole, carvotanacetone, ß-caryophyllene, a- and ß-cubebane, a-amyrin, a-amyrenone, masticadienoic acid and hydroxymasticadienoic acid. The sweet taste (cf. licorice) of the dried berries is due to considerable amounts of sugar. (Phytochemistry, 16, 1301, 1977) The berries are sometimes accused of causing respiratory ailment or irritation of mucous membranes, especially in Florida, where the species has proved quite invasive. This may be due to urushiol-type allergens (see sumac), but the spice grown in Réunion appears to be free of urushiols, and the less effective cardanoles (3-alkylphenoles) were found in lower concentration than Florida-grown pink pepper. Origin Brazil (Schinus terebinthifolius) and Perú (Schinus molle L.). The former was introduced to Florida and today grows there wild; some sources claim that S. molle is commonly planted as an ornamental in the countries around the Mediterranean Sea.

Ancient empire built on beer By ANNE MCILROY Tuesday, November 15, 2005 Globe and Mail Women had more status in Incan and pre-Incan society than they have been given credit for, archeologists say, and not because they were soldiers or political leaders. They brewed the beer. This is one of several findings in an intriguing new research paper about the mysterious last days of the Wari, who lived in the central Andes from 600 to 1000 AD, and predated the Inca. They built an elaborate city on a remote summit in southern Peru that included an industrial-sized brewery, a palace and a temple. The Wari made and drank copious amounts of a beer-like drink called chicha, which was concocted by fermenting corn and Peruvian pepper-tree berries in ceramic vessels. Back then, beer was as important to the Wari as it is to Homer Simpson -- but for different reasons. "There was much more to it than drinking and getting drunk," said University of Florida anthropologist Susan deFrance, part of the team that has spent more than a decade excavating the site. Beer was an economic tool and the Wari would have used it to keep workers who built the mountaintop city happy, she said. "Kind of like the weekend party for people who help you move or paint your house." Evidence suggests beer was also used to get upper-class men to commit their workers to communal jobs, like building canals or temples. It would have been an honour to be invited up the hill for a drink of high-class beer out of ceremonial ceramic vessels, Dr. deFrance said. Making the beer was so important to the Wari that researchers aren't sure the ancient empire could have functioned without it. When they built their summit city, the Wari erected a sophisticated brewery that could make 1,800 litres of beer at a time. It had separate compartments for milling, boiling and fermentation. The researchers found at least 10 elegant shawl pins on the floor of the brewery, brooches used to keep warm wraps around the shoulders. The metal pins, which were worn by noble women as a sign of status, were not found in other areas of the ruins. "The brewers were not only women, but elite women," said Donna Nash, an anthropologist with the Field Museum in Chicago who was part of the team working on the Wari site. The discovery of the shawl pins adds to a growing body of evidence that suggests women in Incan and pre-Incan Andean societies had more authority than has previously been acknowledged, the researchers say. Beer also played an important role in the final days of the outpost, which was the most southern of several Wari settlements. The flat-topped hill, or mesa, wasn't a practical place to live. Food, water and construction materials had to be lugged up 2,400 metres, a climb that takes a good hour today. Researchers believe they built it to impress their neighbours, the Tiwanaku, who reigned to the south in what is now Bolivia. It was first settled around 600 AD, and then abruptly abandoned around 400 years later. No one is sure why. Today, it is still a sacred site for the local indigenous people, and is known to researchers as the ancient imperial colony at Cerro Baul. Remnants found at the site indicate that before the Wari left town, they held a farewell ceremony that began with the brewing of a final batch of chicha. A week later, they drank it, and then as a sacrifice to the gods, torched the brewery and smashed ceramic drinking vessels. They also burned the palace, after a banquet of deer, llama and seven types of ocean fish. It also appears they sacrificed a condor and a pygmy owl before moving out. The Wari seemed to disappear after they left their mountain city. Their society fragmented, and eventually the Inca colonized the area. Research suggests beer was also important to the Incan culture and economy, and the upper-class Incan women were the brew masters. Today, in the Andes, men and women drink chicha and other alcoholic drinks together, Dr. deFrance said. "There's a lot of equality in terms of how men and women drink in the highlands of the Andes," said the anthropologist, a co-author of a paper published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "Women will get as rip-roaring drunk, if not more so, than the men, and it is not frowned upon." It was probably the same when the Wari ruled that part of the world, Dr. deFrance said. Not only did women make the beer, they probably got as stinking drunk as the men. Wari's best brew It is probably a good thing that the Wari drank their chicha, or beer, in pottery vessels because the cloudy brew probably wasn't that appealing to look at, Dr. Susan deFrance says. The Wari had several social classes, and each made its own beer. The top-of-the-line brew was made in the city built on the mountain in southern Peru. Sprouted corn kernels were ground up, and then boiled over fire pits. The women chewed some of the corn, and spit it into the pots to get some microbes into the mix. Spicy pepper tree berries were boil or soaked, then their pits were discarded to leave a syrupy mash. It is not clear whether the corn and berries were combined, or kept separate as distinct kinds of drinks. But the liquid was transported to the fermentation area, placed in 12 vats and aged three to five days. Then it was ready to quaff.

relevant indeed! I once had a girl, or should I say, she once had me... She showed me her room, isn't it good, norwegian wood?

usually men complain of psychological difficulties because they don't get sex

Has it come to this? The Globe and Mail http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/sto...Story/Business/ They know what songs you like, even before you like them. Record labels spend millions of dollars each year trying to predict what singles will top the charts and which ingredients make a hit single. Now, two Massachusetts Institute of Technology PhD grads believe they have cracked the code. After years of crunching data, Brian Whitman and Tristan Jehan have devised a computer program that listens to a song, then predicts how humans will react to it. The response is so specific at times that it can forecast how a single will perform on the charts and spit out a review, guessing what words will be used to describe it, from “sexy to romantic to loud and upbeat,” Mr. Whitman said. It's a long way from the days of talent scouts combing smoky bars for the next big sound. But computer analysis of songs is not necessarily new. A wide variety of companies spend hours in laboratories breaking down hit songs so the music industry can stay one step ahead of the market. The goal is to pinpoint trends in pitch, rhythm and cadence that are driving consumer spending habits. However, the MIT researchers believe they've taken the science to another level. “Some people really care about instrument sounds and complexity of the music,” Mr. Whitman said. “But the 14-year-old teenage girl could care less, as long as her friends are listening to it.” The MIT method, developed at the school's renowned Media Laboratory, also takes into account social responses to hit music that are fed into the algorithms. The researchers pull data from weblogs, chat rooms and music reviews — anywhere a song is being discussed — and feed it into the computer, which allows the software to gauge the popularity of a certain sound. Once all the information is tabulated, the computer can listen to an entirely new album and predict how people will respond based on what it knows about the latest reactions to the music it has already heard. If it sounds far-fetched, consider this: the system has been predicting Billboard hits with surprising accuracy over the past several months. While people may think their musical tastes are unpredictable and whimsical, they are actually quite traceable, Mr. Whitman says. Unless of course you participate in the AOTW thread The researchers' goal is to revolutionize the tracking techniques used by companies such as Amazon.com and Apple Computer Inc.'s iTunes music store. Those companies compare similarities between songs, add in the buying history of consumers, then recommend albums that each person should buy. Mr. Whitman and Mr. Jehan, who are both musicians, scoff at those methods. “They say you bought this so you'll like this. But it's really bad for music because it can only recommend stuff that people have bought a lot of,” he said. Still, the music industry has been trying for decades to come up with a reliable system. The standard practice today is to crunch data from focus groups across a broad spectrum of tastes, which gives hints of a song's true potential in the market. New York-based HitPredictor has built its business crunching weekly data from focus groups, and many of the play lists heard on North American radio are influenced by the company. HitPredictor polls thousands of listeners each week on songs that have not yet been released, then makes prognostications on how the single will perform. The company established its credibility in 2002 when RCA used its method to determine the order in which the singles from Christina Aguilera's album Stripped should be released to maximize record sales. Since then, other labels have turned into regular customers. After crunching feedback data on the Aguilera album, HitPredictor realized RCA needed to rethink the release order because the focus groups were unexpectedly reacting favourably to some songs, but not others. Each prediction the company made in terms of how well each single would sell eventually proved true in the market. Did they crunch the Hancock/Aguilera duet too? “A lot of labels put music through our research to confirm their instincts,” said Doug Ford, co-founder of HitPredictor. “They've got a few guys in management that like this song, but marketing likes that song, so they go through us.” HitPredictor struck gold again in late 2003, when its computers flagged a blip in the focus-group data. Listeners, who are fed random songs and asked to rate them, were repeatedly highlighting a little-known U.S. band called Crossfade, which the big labels had passed over. Mr. Ford went to Sony Music and told the company to consider listening to HitPredictor's computers and focus groups rather than their own talent scouts. In 2004, the band sold more than a million albums. Maybe just the computer program liked the song Despite the performance of HitPredictor, the researchers at MIT aren't looking to build another software program that simply picks commercial hits. Mr. Whitman and Mr. Jehan's goal is to expose the world to a wider variety of music. Forecasting what songs people will like before they hear them is easy, they say. In many ways, it's been done for decades without computers. Finding good songs is much harder. “There's too much music out there and its really hard to figure out what you want to hear,” Mr. Whitman said. “So we have systems here that are automatically identifying what people like, without knowing much about them . . . we're trying to get in between the audio and the audience.”

I think you're right about Paris. I did a search at work on Factiva and got a few hits. Here's a couple of samples: Detroit Free Press, 3 June 2005. (referring to Baker's Keyboard Lounge gig) "When he flew in from Paris last November, it was his first local gig in about a decade." Sydney Morning Herald, 1996 "Little-known in Australia, the Paris-based pianist has a high-profile in Europe where, in addition to his own projects, he plays with two groups immensely popular on the festival circuit: The Leaders (which boasts an impressive line-up including trumpeter Lester Bowie and saxophonists Arthur Blythe and Chico Freeman), and Roots (a repertory ensemble specialising in tributes to influential saxophonists)." I guess I am lucky to have seen him when I did. And now the Europeans are.

I was listening to Lightsey's Isotope (Criss Cross) last night, and it occured to me I have no idea what this great pianist has been up to lately, or whether he tours, etc. There's been no dedicated thread on Organissimo - other than mentions in the "underated pianist" threads. What's up? I saw him a few times in Detroit and once in Windsor in my teen years. He was playing with trumpeter Marcus Belgrave, just after his Dexter Gordon association. I think they were promoting the Kirk 'n Marcus recording - also on Criss Cross. I just remember sitting near him as he made a little spintet piano sound like a grand. I am pretty sure drummer Roy Brooks and saxophonist Larry Smith were performing too. What a night. The poor dude doesn't even have his own website or fan site from what I see. The latest recording I could find on the 'net is The Nights of Bradley's w/ Rufus Reid after a 10 year gap in recording - Goodbye Mr. Evans was in 1994. Anyone else have his recordings, seen him live, or know what he's doing now?

Very sad news.

Trebek is a Canadian with a Philosophy degree. Need I say more? In his past he was also the host of Music Hop: And you guys got Dick Clark

For the record - I'm not John Arpin. He's a much more fabulous player than I - from the Toronto area as well. When my Windows Media Player sorted out my MP3s on my computer, for some reason it took my digital piano recording and labelled it with another CD of his I own. Thanks nonetheless Red!

Most Baroque music will do the trick. There's a reason why classical stations play primarily baroque during the morning rush hour time. Medieval voices do it for me also. I have to confess - it's a little spiritually new age - but I have this CD playing on my laptop right now at work as I type this. "Chants of Heaven" (Shamballah records). Debussy's piano works are another fave. Indian classical music too. If I listen to jazz all the time at work I get too much in the groove and less accomplished

Bev - you may be right - re VW#2 - I'm going from aural memory here at work. It perhaps was just the intro. I remember playing it for the first time on LP and my roomate called it "morbid". Got to love those business majors! I stand by the Part though. (no Umlauts on my laptop)

Although it becomes a little uplifting in the end with the vocal frenzy, Avro Part's Te Deum has a darkly sonic introduction and sustains that mood throughout (pretty dark for a hymn of praise in fact). Another Vaughan Williams selection, symphony #2, the London Symphony is very dark.

This was a great bio. There was so much about Mr Blount I did not know or I found was obscured from other questionable sources. It's an academic approach to a complex man. Even though it got a little heavy in the political/social background of radical politics in the US etc., it never detracted from the overall theme/argument of the bio. Plus all the stuff on his devotion to Fletcher Henderson, the detailed rehearsal sessions, the Pythagoran lifestyle, Egyptian history, the Birmingham music scene as well. (Aside: I reviewed this book for the Montreal based pub - Planet Jazz, in spring of 99.) 2nd aside: The Arkestra is playing for a few days this week in Toronto. Anyone see this config recently? I'd should check out Marshall Allen before he boards the mother ship.

Man - I didn't recognize you guys with the recent photo-shoot. Well done! You guys are getting the press you deserve!

That's what came to mind for me. I agree that it's not as big a discovery, but the story of how this was discovered is as improbably amazing as the story behind the Bird and Diz at Town Hall discovery. ← OK, I've obviously been living in a cave for several years. I've never heard this -- when'd it come out?? What's the story?? ← The Story

What about Jazz Kat's recent discovery of Spyro Gyra

I love the album, and I usually dislike singer/piano recordings. Last year I heard "Waltz for Debbie" for the umpteenth time on the radio as I was driving to the school where I was giving piano lessons. It was a dull fall day, like today, and Gene Lee's lyrics really struck me. Maybe because of my young daughter, and thinking about her growing up. But hearing Bennett’s phrasing in the last verse made my eyes well up. He really embodied the spirit of that tune.

Is this the first case of Florida's new "stand your ground" law?

Check this site that sells 'em. The ad copy translation is a hoot! Jim - it's made of silicon rubber It also comes with a "private porch" Roll up keyboard

So I guess it can conveniently double as a massage mat or a bathrobe.

Any photos of the tour bus?

If only they could. We discussed something similar this past weekend at Griffin's 40th birthday party (if you note his last name, he is indeed the son of Michael Ondaatje - author of the English Patient). It never got a release because of the rights to use Dylan's music in the doc. They could only afford 1 year of rights - for 2003 when they peddled it off at the festivals. So its on the shelf, so to speak. Maybe Marty is reading this thread right now and will come through. They are looking into distributing a DVD version (another aside - I am in the DVD version but not the film. I am playing "Sara" on a harmonium in my driveway. I even have a speaking part (don't ask)).