Brownian Motion

Bus Moten Truck Parham The Ship of Fools

I love those half dozen trio side MLW made for Asch in 1944--Al Hall on bass and Bill Coleman on trumpet. Not a well-engineered set, however.

Anne Frank Waldo Frank Where's Waldo?

The New York Times Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By February 15, 2007 Has Trumpet, Will Surprise By BEN RATLIFF The same night that some rather questionable choices were under consideration in the jazz categories at the Grammy Awards, there was the trumpeter John McNeil, one of the best improvisers working in jazz, performing in the small back room of Biscuit, a barbecue restaurant in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Mr. McNeil plays at Biscuit every Sunday, leading a band with the tenor saxophonist Bill McHenry. The room was full and the music was bright, swinging and complicated. This is just one of Mr. McNeil’s recent bands, and its repertory is a clutch of tough little pieces from the 1950s by Russ Freeman, Gerry Mulligan, Dizzy Gillespie, Wilbur Harden and others. After a year the gig has become one of the best regular jazz events in the city. Mr. McNeil is a kind of trickster figure. How else to explain his newest group, My Band Foot Foot? Its mandate is to play arrangements of songs by the Shaggs, the trio of desperately untalented New Hampshire sisters who made a single album in 1969, “Philosophy of the World,” a milestone of pop folk-art. The band will play its first performance this Saturday at the Cornelia Street Café in Greenwich Village. Medium size, stocky, white-haired, with large, hooded eyes hidden by glasses, he seems armored, moving stiffly and wearing fingerless gloves onstage in the winter. Ritually he warms up his fingering hand with the flame from a candle. But when he plays, nothing is occluded: he delivers high-level improvisations at fairly quiet volume with astonishing harmonic acuity and a uniquely liquid, even sound. Between songs come gallows-humor microphone breaks. “This is the part of the show where the band plays the blues, and one of us talks over it,” he baritone-deadpanned toward the end of a set on Sunday. “I don’t talk very well over this kind of happy, major-key blues, though. Maybe I could do it over a blues in E. It would have to slow down. And I could tell you about my childhood. Which was really painful. Any- way. ...” Five years ago Mr. McNeil, who is now 58, started making records for the small Omnitone label. There are three now — “This Way Out,” “Sleep Won’t Come” and “East Coast Cool” — and they have all been startling. Here was a mature composer and a first-rate player, pulling together jazz’s postwar strands: bebop language to the letter, tricky-meter tunes, free jazz, 20th-century classical harmony. (Listen to a solo like the poised, singing one he plays on “Wanwood,” from “East Coast Cool”: moving all around the horn, it keeps offering fresh harmonic choices as it moves among chords.) The records were playful too, full of wicked personality, like Mr. McNeil himself. But who is he? You might still have to ask musicians to know. He came to New York in 1974 and quickly developed a high reputation among musicians, first as a sideman with Horace Silver and the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis big band, later as a bandleader himself. (A 1979 album he made with the trumpeter Tom Harrell, “Look to the Sky,” became a favorite among trumpet players.) Then, by public traces, not much. He made a string of records — some of them perfunctory by his own admission — on the Danish label Steeplechase, and he performed rarely from the late ’80s to the late ’90s. One reason for his obscurity was a constitutional resistance to self-promotion. When asked to construct a thorough genealogy of jazz trumpet players up to 1993 for the landmark jazz-studies book “Thinking in Jazz,” by Paul Berliner, he omitted himself. (Were he in it, he might be shown as coming out of Thad Jones and Freddie Hubbard, with a little of Blue Mitchell’s dark, warm sound, and Lester Bowie’s imagination in free improvising.) “Do I know what I can do?” he asked, rhetorically, in a recent conversation. “Yeah, of course. I can handle changes, I can play in all keys, I can write some good music. I just can’t say that.” Another was day work. He started teaching occasional clinics at the New England Conservatory in Boston, then took over a music theory class there in 1989, which he has continued, teaching two days a week. Hundreds of his students are scattered around the jazz scene, including Mr. McHenry and Dave Douglas. Mr. McNeil is regarded as a master not only of trumpet technique but also of the practical and creative applications of harmonic theory. But the big reason was Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease, a neural disorder that affects the nerves and, by extension, the muscles in the extremities of the body. The illness is hereditary: his father had it, though the signs didn’t show until he was in his 70s. Growing up in Yreka (pronounced why-REE-kuh), Calif., near the Oregon border, Mr. McNeil dealt with it from childhood, wearing braces from his legs to his neck from the ages of 7 through 16, when a series of operations relieved him of the braces. In the late ’50s Mr. McNeil saw Louis Armstrong on Milton Berle’s show. Inspired, he taught himself how to play trumpet and read music, but burdened himself with poor technique; at the University of Portland in Oregon, a teacher straightened him out. It was not the last time he would be starting from scratch. Starting around 1982 there were days when he couldn’t make his fingers do what he wanted. And whereas Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease rarely affects the muscles of the face, in Mr. McNeil’s case it did, as well as the tongue and the diaphragm. “So, basically, I have the big three for trumpet playing,” he said, laughing. One of those bad days was captured on an album, “The Things We Did Last Summer.” It spooked Mr. McNeil, and though he kept touring, he decided not to record again for a while. “Then I just stopped everything,” he said. “The irregularity was maddening. I began to think I didn’t have any talent. It does strange things to your confidence. You don’t have to fail absolutely to have no confidence: you just have to fail every so often.” From 1983 to 1996 he made no more records; he concentrated on technique. (He also underwent surgery to have his spine reconstructed.) He learned what he now had to do to execute his ideas: he needed to be amplified and to develop a method of correctly balancing the muscles in his face to maintain sufficient compression. In 1997 he discovered he could not extend the fingers in his right hand, which he uses for fingering his instrument. During two years he bought himself a left-handed trumpet, learned how to finger with his left hand and made a record left-handed. (It was called “Fortuity,” and Allan Chase, the saxophonist on the record, insists he still can’t tell the difference.) Finally he regained the use of his right hand, went back to his normal playing practice and started his midlife renewal, forming one band after another and making music on his own terms. Mr. McNeil has never defined himself by the illness. (During his high school years he had diagnostic tests at the Mayo Clinic, and was told that he should not pursue a career as a musician. He still feels he is avenging that advice.) He has largely hidden it from the public, though now he says it might be useful for people to know about it — “so they can see it’s no big deal,” he explained. Recently he was fitted for some handsome new custom-made finger braces that allow him to curve his fingers better. “And they’re sterling silver,” he said, showing them off between sets. “So I have a little bit of a pimp thing going on.”

Kitten Cat Anderson Pussy Galore Puss In Boots Boots and His Buddies Shoe

Don't you enjoy the hunt?

Master of Jazz has reissued all the Wilson sides from the 1930s. These include a pair of CDs made up of small group instrumentals, and 3 volumes titled "Teddy and the Girls" which feature Teddy-led groups supporting singers other than Billie. The Teddy-Billie sides are also on Masters of Jazz but are under Billie's name.

Harry Chapin Tom Chapin Lauren Chapin

Irma Vep Amerigo Vespucci Anatole France 50 Million Frenchmen The Yellow Peril The Red Menace

Dudley Fosdick Don Elliott Hot Lips Page

Speaking of shoddy treatment--the track listing includes relatively few Red Allen masterpieces. In fact, a lot of it is second-rate. 1. Bugle Call Rag 2. Oh! Peter 3. Margie 4. Spider Crawl 5. Who's Sorry Now 6. Take It Slow And Easy 7. Bald-Headed Mama 8. I Would Do Anything For You 9. Mean Old Bed Bug Blues 10. Yellow Dog Blues 11. Yes Suh! 12. Who Stole The Lock? 13. Shine On Your Shoes 14. It's Gonna Be You 15. Someone Stole Gabriel's Horn 16. Till The Clock Strikes Three 17. You'll Never Go To Heaven (If You Break My Heart) 18. Miller's Daughter, Marianne 19. Merry-Go-Round Broke Down 20. Have You Ever Been In Heaven? 21. (Is It) Love Or Infatuation? 22. I Owe You 23. Can I Forget You? 24. Canal Street Blues 25. Shim Me Sha Wabble 26. King Porter Stomp 27. K.K. Boogie 28. Sometimes I'm Happy 29. Ol' Man River 30. A Sheridan,, Square" 31. Siesta At The Fiesta 32. Jack The Bellboy 33. Indiana 34. Indiana (Take 2) 35. Jack The Bellboy (Take 2) 36. Theme 37. Ride, Red, Ride 38. Just A Feeling 39. Dark Eyes 40. Dear Old Southland 41. Red Jump 42. Get The Mop 43. Crawl 44. Buzz Me 45. Drink Hearty 46. Get The Mop 47. Count Me Out 48. Check Up 49. It It's Love You Want 50. Let Me Miss You 51. Struttin' With Some Barbecue 52. Squeeze Me 53. Love Is Just Around The Corner 54. Body And Soul 55. Sweet Sue (Just You) 56. Snag It 57. I Ain't Got Nobody 58. St. James Infirmary 59. Ride, Red, Ride 60. Eh, La Bas (Trad) 61. Ain't She Sweet 62. Beale Street Blues 63. Clarinet Marmalade

Julia Child Captain Kidd Juvenal

Is this "manipulation"? I'm watching the Super Bowl. The Bears give up yet another third & long conversion. I yell an expletive or two. Coltrane and Gracie come at me from both sides and start licking my face, because they know I am upset and they don't want me to be that way. Dan- All we know for certain is that you have yelled, and that your dogs have responded by licking your face. You may interpret that however you wish; but your interpretation may not be reality. For instance, it could be that when you are so excited as to yell, you begin to sweat, and that your dogs can smell the sweat and come over to enjoy a few licks.

From Slate Why People Love Dogs It's more complicated than you think. By Jon Katz Updated Monday, Feb. 12, 2007, at 7:17 AM ET My friend and fellow dog lover Edie, an occupational therapist in Massachusetts, has been looking for a mate for nearly 10 years. She finally thought she'd found one in Jeff, a nice guy, generous and funny, who teaches high school. They dated for several months, and just as there was talk about a future, it occurred to Edie that Jeff hadn't really bonded with her yellow Lab, Sophie. In fact, as she thought more about it, she wasn't sure Jeff was a dog guy at all. She confronted him about this at dinner one night, and he confessed, in some anguish, that he didn't love Sophie, didn't love dogs in general, never had. They broke up the next week. More accurately, she dumped him. "What can I say?" Edie told me, somewhat defensively. "Sophie has been there for me, day in and day out, for years. I can't say the same of men. She's my girl, my baby. Sooner or later, it would have ended." Having just spent two months on a book tour talking to dog lovers across the country, I can testify that this story isn't unusual. The lesson Edie gleaned, she says, was that she should have asked about Sophie first, not last. In America, we love our dogs. A lot. So much that we rarely wonder why anymore. This, perhaps, is why God created academics. John Archer, a psychologist at the University of Central Lancashire, has been puzzling for some time over why people love their pets. In evolutionary terms, love for dogs and other pets "poses a problem," he writes. Being attached to animals is not, strictly speaking, necessary for human health and welfare. True, studies show that people with pets live a bit longer and have better blood pressure than benighted nonowners, but in the literal sense, we don't really need all those dogs and cats to survive. Archer's alternative Darwinian theory: Pets manipulate the same instincts and responses that have evolved to facilitate human relationships, "primarily (but not exclusively) those between parent and child." No wonder Edie ditched Jeff. She was about to marry the evil stepfather, somebody who wasn't crazy about her true child. Or, to look at it from the opposite direction, Archer suggests, "consider the possibility that pets are, in evolutionary terms, manipulating human responses, that they are the equivalent of social parasites." Social parasites inject themselves into the social systems of other species and thrive there. Dogs are masters at that. They show a range of emotions-love, anxiety, curiosity-and thus trick us into thinking they possess the full range of human feelings. They dance with joy when we come home, put their heads on our knees and stare longingly into our eyes. Ah, we think, at last, the love and loyalty we so richly deserve and so rarely receive. Over thousands of years of living with humans, dogs have become wily and transfixing sidekicks with the particularly appealing characteristic of being unable to speak. We are therefore free to fill in the blanks with what we need to hear. (What the dog may really be telling us, much of the time, is, "Feed me.") As Archer dryly puts it, "Continuing features of the interaction with the pet prove satisfying for the owner." It's a good deal for the pets, too, since we respond by spending lavishly on organic treats and high-quality health care. Psychologist Brian Hare of Harvard has also studied the human-animal bond and reports that dogs are astonishingly skilled at reading humans' patterns of social behavior, especially behaviors related to food and care. They figure out our moods and what makes us happy, what moves us. Then they act accordingly, and we tell ourselves that they're crazy about us. "It appears that dogs have evolved specialized skills for reading human social and communicative behavior," Hare concludes, which is why dogs live so much better than moles. These are interesting theories. Raccoons and squirrels don't show recognizable human emotions, nor do they trigger our nurturing ("She's my baby") impulses. So, they don't (usually) move into our houses, get their photos taken with Santa, or even get names. Thousands of rescue workers aren't standing by to move them lovingly from one home to another. If the dog's love is just an evolutionary trick, does that diminish it? I don't think so. Dogs have figured out how to insinuate themselves into human society in ways that benefit us both. We get affection and attention. They get the same, plus food, shelter, and protection. To grasp this exchange doesn't trivialize our love, it explains it. I'm enveloped by dog love, myself. Izzy, a border collie who spent the first four years of his life running along a small square of fencing on a nearby farm, is lying under my desk at the moment, his head resting on my boot. Rose, my working dog, is curled into a tight ball in the crate to my left. Emma, the newcomer who spent six years inside the same fence as Izzy, prefers the newly re-upholstered antique chair. Plagued with health problems, she likes to be near the wood stove in the winter. When I stir to make tea, answer the door, or stretch my legs, all three dogs move with me. I see them peering out from behind the kitchen table or pantry door, awaiting instructions, as border collies do. If I return to the computer, they resume their previous positions, with stealth and agility. If I analyzed it coldly, I would admit that they're probably alert to see if an outdoor romp is in the offing, or some sheepherding, or some beef jerky. But I'd rather think they can't bear to let me out of their sight. Jon Katz is the author of A Good Dog: The Story of Orson, Who Changed My Life

Jolly Roger Big Poison Little Poison http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lloyd_Waner

If she is a real individual, rather than a staff of customer service reps hiding behind one name to create the illusion of a cozy mom 'n' pop operation, then I hope she has good benefits.

Another trumpet player who belongs on this thread is John Wilson, who I was amazed to discover was active as recently as 2005. Here's an article. http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05128/499780.stm

This 1929 recording sums up the 1920s and hot jazz in about three minutes. Great Pee Wee Russell, Coleman Hawkins, Red McKenzie on comb and tissue paper, and--of all people--Glenn Miller on trombone. I've been listening to "Lola" for 45 years, and I've never gotten tired of it. The flip side, "One Hour", is almost as good.

Max Born I. M. Pei Jean Todt Jean Rhys Edward Rochester Buffalo Bill Cody

Israel Crosby Isaac Newton Abraham Lincoln Will Penny Buffalo Springfield Lincoln Kirstein

MG, If you prize chocolate, you might enjoy this rather long and detailed investigative blog report on NoKA chocolate. I just finished reading it.

Michelle Shocked Eric Daze Bernard Shakey The Sheik The Sheik of Araby Chic Young

Little Joe Cartwright Alf Landon Nancy Kassebaum

The New York Times Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By February 8, 2007 If Leonardo Had Made Toys By MICHEL MARRIOTT LEONARDO DA VINCI’S 15th-century vision of mechanical flight apparently never included fixed wings assisted by propellers or jet engines. His chief inspiration was birds, reflected in drawings of a flying machine fashioned to stay aloft by flapping its wings. More than 500 years later, WowWee, a robotics and entertainment products company, shares that vision. Next month, it plans to release a mass-produced, functional ornithopter, a device that flies in birdlike fashion — in this case, a radio-controlled toy that mechanically flaps its Mylar wings. The inspiration — besides Leonardo’s work — is an insect, said Sean Frawley, the 22-year-old inventor of the toy, the FlyTech Dragonfly. “People have been experimenting all around the world with these kinds of things,” Mr. Frawley, an aerospace engineering graduate of Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Fla., and project manager for WowWee, said in a telephone interview from the company’s office in Hong Kong. During demonstration flights of the Dragonfly last month at the Consumer Electronics Show, the annual technology showcase in Las Vegas, the fluttering, footlong bug was an enormous hit. Throngs of onlookers clamored for a chance to buy the $50 toy on the spot. At the time, none were for sale. The robotic Dragonfly will take flight again at the American International Toy Fair, the largest toy trade show in the Western Hemisphere, which begins Sunday in New York. But it will hardly be alone there in its use of technologies that are giving a new generation of toys extraordinary capabilities to fly, float, walk and roll — almost always inexpensively — in ways unimaginable just a few years ago. “Is there a revolution?” asked Gene Khasminsky, the design director for Interactive Toy Concepts, the Canadian maker of the Micro Mosquito, a palm-size, radio-controlled helicopter that was in demand among holiday shoppers at about $70. “I think, right now, that there is a push back from our industry to get kids off the couch where they’re playing video games,” Mr. Khasminsky said in a telephone interview from his office in Toronto. “We’re moving into an age where toys are becoming more high-tech to stay competitive with gaming.” He suggested that navigating well-designed vehicles in the physical world — like the company’s inventory of remote-controlled helicopters, planes and helium blimps — is vastly more compelling than steering a virtual vehicle in a computer-generated universe. Executives at Mattel, which owns Tyco, are placing their bets on a new kind of radio-controlled three-wheeled vehicle it is calling the Tyco R/C Terrainiac. Scheduled to go on sale in the summer for about $80, the Terrainiac is a futuristic-looking vehicle powered by a single rear wheel that is a complex treaded ball, referred to by its makers as a “sphere drive.” The body of the vehicle has been engineered with a controllable joint that allows the Terrainiac to pivot or twist like a human torso. The results are radical turns at high speeds as its high-torque electric motor drives the vehicle over practically any sort of terrain; thus its name. But George Benz, director of marketing for Tyco Radio Control, said the toy will not be limited to solid surfaces. The sphere drive is hollow, helping to provide buoyancy as well as locomotion when the Terrainiac takes to the water. “The tricky part of development is making these toys have tremendous performance on land and really deliver when it gets wet,” he said. WowWee, whose previous creations include the robotic toy Robosapien, is also working on a radio-controlled vehicle for release this year that walks on four spidery, multijointed legs. It is called Roboquad and is expected to cost $100. And Wild Planet Entertainment, which makes a line of “spy toys for any mission” under the rubric Spy Gear, had added a surveillance wrinkle to a rather conventional remote-controlled vehicle. Its Spy Video Car, which sells for $140, has a front-mounted camera that wirelessly transmits a live video image that can be viewed in an eyepiece. “A separate transmitter in the car transmits the video over a 2.4 megahertz frequency like a wireless phone uses,” said Shannon Bruzelius, the product integrity engineer at Wild Planet, which operates research and development centers in San Francisco and Hong Kong. He said the company plans to add a $15 Mobile Spy Ear vehicle (not remotely controlled) equipped with a microphone and an amplifier that can wirelessly beam sounds up to 75 feet to an earbud the user wears. But of all the innovations brimming in toy vehicles these days, the most startling have been reserved for those that achieve flight. Late last year, Jakks Pacific, a toymaker in Malibu, Calif., released a lightweight radio-controlled flying wing called the XPV, or Xtreme Performance Vehicle, which sells for $60. Once its onboard battery is fully charged, the twin-propeller craft can soar as high as a 20-story building. “As technology progresses, the performance of the electronics improves so much that, in a sense, you get more horsepower,” Michael Bernstein, vice president for boys marketing at Jakks Pacific, said in a telephone interview this week. That “horsepower,” Mr. Bernstein said, is getting cheaper, freeing designers to reach higher and enabling toymakers to deliver more affordable mass-market products — more RadioShack than Sharper Image. The company plans to unveil more high-performance vehicles under the XPV banner at the toy fair. Radio-controlled flight was long the expensive purview of hobbyists and model-making enthusiasts, Mr. Khasminsky of Interactive Toy Concepts said. But microelectric motors have become plentiful and relatively inexpensive. Economies of scale are making once-exotic materials like sturdy and lightweight carbon-fiber cheaper, and newer materials, like EPP foam (expanded polypropylene, which looks and feels like a more resilient Styrofoam) are available, helping achieve sustained flight. HobbyTron.com, based in Orem, Utah, makes a 6-inch-long, $40 infrared-controlled helicopter, the Picco Z, in which its entire body is made from EPP foam. At the same time, microprocessors continue to integrate more functions onto single chips, increasing their overall computing power while the chips become lighter and cheaper, toymakers say. Caleb Chung, the inventor of the 1990s toy hit Furby and a co-founder of Ugobe, a builder of lifelike robotic creatures, said: “The price of processing power has dropped to the floor. I can buy the equivalent of an Apple II processor for a dime.” At such prices, Mr. Chung said he can use cheaper motors in his Pleo baby dinosaur because he is confident that the $300 robotic reptile’s processors will help regulate those motors to ensure smooth, organic and even “emotive” movements when it is released this summer. But one of the greatest boons to flight has been new battery technology, said Mr. Frawley, the Dragonfly creator. He said lithium-polymer batteries, the same malleable lightweight rechargeable power source in Apple’s iPod Nano, had freed flying toys from heavy, bulky batteries and their metal cases. Mr. Frawley said the lithium-polymer battery in his Dragonfly weighs no more than a penny and can deliver up to 10 minutes of flight after about a 20-minute charge. Yet he noted that the Dragonfly’s predecessor, a kit he designed and sold as a teenager along with a friend, was more energy-efficient. It was powered by rubber bands.

Anna Nicole Smith. Like the hedgehog she knew one big thing.