Dr. Rat

What about Noj? Is that really Norah Jones in a big hurry? --eric

Nothing really new aside from the genre-blending thing. But when were the "old distinctions" secure? Are they really so old? What sense did they make in the first place? Weren't they invented just to bring order to record store stock? (Excepting, of course, the distinction between "serious music" and everything else--the old high culture/low culture distinction, but I think most would agree we are well rid of that one.) Nonesuch was indeed "decades ahead of everyone." But were they really so unusual when they were founded? --eric

There's a bunch of stuff that can fo wrong with cd players (at the station we've got some that are ten years old that've been through a number of repairs, but these are worth fixing: they're made to run continuously.) Your laser might be shot or the tracking might be off--suffice it to say many things can go wrong that'll cost a fair deal of money to fix, more than most cd players are worth. My solution at home is to buy essentially disposable cd players. When it goes haywire, I give it to one of the kids and buy myself a new one. Audiophiles will howl and call me a philistine, but frankly I can't tell the difference between a $70 machine and a $400 one. I am skeptical that they would be able to in a double blind test. You can clean the lens by taking the machine apart and gently rubbing it (the lens, I mean) with a q-tip soaked in high purity rubbing alcohol. --eric

I would recommend some young Braff. The Bethlehem recording mentioned above is good, as if Braff! on Columbia/Portrait. There's a disc on RCA with some too-reverby recording which has good performances from Braff and Pee Wee Russell (who sounds really weird with reverb). The RCA is called This Is My Lucky Day. --eric

Don't worry, he's a nice rat. Just don't give him anything to chew! Coincidentally, they just announced the first rat cloning in September. --eric

Cool. Thanks. I'll put "London Fields" at the top of my list and report back. "Can an aversion to Martin Amis Be Overcome? Find out at 11 (about two weeks from now)"

I'd be interested in your thoughts on Amis. I started one of his books and left it off after a while because his manner annoyed me at the time, and recently he ran a completely idiotic pangyric for Saul Bellow in the December Atlantic. (Summary which can stand for the whole: "I'm Martin Amis, and, dammit, I think Saul Bellow is just the greatest.") Unfortunately, The Atlantic hasn't posted the article to its website. (They've run a bunch of articles lately which they probably wish had never happened.) But, I'm still looking for an excuse to give Amis another try. --eric

OK. No one is interested, I'm sure, but it turns out that calculating the probability of a particular number of boys here is pretty complicated, involving the use of Pascal's Triangle (interesting in itself). There is a triangle generator at Swarthmore if you want to work it out yourself. (The triangle is realted to fractals and Fibonacci numbers, as well. Fun fun) I find that I should not have thrown out the 2 males out of three family. So your family stands at 13 boys out of 18 tries, which I find to be 3.3% probability. 8568/262144 .032684326171875 or about 3.3% My former gentic councellor friend could think of no male-favoring mutation right off the bat. But I'm probably still wrong. --eric

Has anyone in your family ever gone to a genetic reproduction clinic about this? They might even give you a free test once you fill them in on your story. And yes there are reasons for this sort of thing--my girlfriend is the expert, though: she worked in a genetic counselling lab for a few years (not much of that sort of work up here in TC, though). Let me work out the probabilities, here: the 2:1 distribution is normal, so we'll throw that out. So we got 11/15 boys. Normal distribution would be, for our purposes, 7 boys. The chances for next boy is 50/50 or .5 and so on. By my calculations the chances of your family's sexual distribution happening at random is something like 6.25%. Not really so far-fetched, I guess. I haven't actually given this much thought, so perhaps a more math-minded person could correct this. --eric This, by the way, is completely wrong. At least I think, --eric

"Strange Fruit" is probably the most widely known protest song in jazz, although "Black and Blue" is up there, too. However, neither song pioneered the genre. Listen to Bessie Smith's "Poor Man's Blues," for example, and there are many more blues whose lyrics have social significance. You are right, and I did think of blues when I wrote what I did about Strange Fruit, but this song still seems to me to mark a transition. There seems to me to be a change between the many socially-conscious blues and jazz/blues tunes starting from the early days of recording and the "protest song" sorta stuff that started to come out of the Cafe Society circle. And again, I think there is a change in the 1960s away from this sort of thing toward another style of politics-in-jazz. What do you think? --eric

Exactly. Thank you Alexander. Right, that seems to be everyone's take. Which is why I was trying to shepherd the discussion toward somewhat more specific questions: If I may quote myself. This line assuming what we all seem to agree to: But art is not always identically political. I think the more interesting issue would be How art is/should be political raher than Whether. --eric

I don't necessarily agree with "Burns's" view, but certainly, probably starting with "Strange Fruit," jazz started to go in a different direction as to how politics was to be integrated into the entire presentation. John Hammond didn't want to take the step with "Strange Fruit," (I think he thought the song was unacceptably maudlin and melodramatic, whatever its good intentions--criticisms some renditions of the song are definitely succeptible to). Burns seems on board for Stange Fruit, but then wants to hop off when later jazz folks want to a) break with the new deal liberal consensus; and b) present politcs more directly, in a far less poetcized/aestheticized way than even Strange Fruit did. He's just drawing a line and saying "thus far and no farther," it seems to me. He might be wrong as to where he draws the line, but there's nothing contradictory or hypocritical about it. --eric

Essentially it's random chance. That's the expected state of affairs. A 50/50 as to whether an X or a Y sperm gets to the (always x) ova first. But other factors can come into play. One obvious one would be a mutation on the X chromosome which would cause all or most XX zygotes (not sure this is the technically correct term here) to be spontaneously aborted. I imagine there might be other mutations on the X that might, say, make the X sperms far less lively (like dragging around a whole load of extra genetic material), but here I speculate. I'll send an email to my gal, she'll know. --eric

Has anyone in your family ever gone to a genetic reproduction clinic about this? They might even give you a free test once you fill them in on your story. And yes there are reasons for this sort of thing--my girlfriend is the expert, though: she worked in a genetic counselling lab for a few years (not much of that sort of work up here in TC, though). Let me work out the probabilities, here: the 2:1 distribution is normal, so we'll throw that out. So we got 11/15 boys. Normal distribution would be, for our purposes, 7 boys. The chances for next boy is 50/50 or .5 and so on. By my calculations the chances of your family's sexual distribution happening at random is something like 6.25%. Not really so far-fetched, I guess. I haven't actually given this much thought, so perhaps a more math-minded person could correct this. --eric

Since everybody seems to think the art/politics dichotomy is a false one (that is, that no matter what art is going to have some sort of political significance), why don't we rephrase the question a bit. What do we think of art that (more or less) explicitly aims to encourage some social or political goal? Is this a bad thing to try to do? Does it still work as art? Does it work as politics? Artsists, of course have their right to an opinion, and their right to express it, but is it a good idea to do so through their art? Or is it best to leave the political significance of art to be of the more or less accidental type? One argument I've seen advanced by some folks is that in many cases art is too interesting a form to harness to the essentially uninsightful content political art tends to convey. There are, of course, obvious counter-examples to this notion. --eric

Nice summation. I'm curious what the conflict is...I see the classical and new stuff as "both/and" rather than "either/or." For instance, if you look at threads here of the type, 'what jazz records first pulled you into the music', the answers generally refer to a classic. Once you get into the music, you generally find your way to the newer stuff. Well, it is a value conflict--so, yes, I do recognize what you're saying about the attractions of the classics. But I sometimes see this as a slippery slope sort of issue (you have to realize, too, that this isn't a heavily programmed station--people choose their own tracks within a relatively loose set of requirements, so I've always got to ask "What's the worst thing that could happen," because it will.). So if I open things up too far to revisiting the classics I'm going to have Freddy the Freeloader and So What and Compared to What and . . . . every single day for the rest of my life. Much as I might like those tunes, I don't think I could stand to listen after a while. The standard now is that most of what gets on the air is from a 100-cd current rotation (with occasional obscure classics thrown in for a bit of levening) which is supposed to comprise 80% of the jazz that gets played. This works out reasonably well, but can probably use some tweaking. I've been thinking of getting a Sound Vault-type system where I could create lists of classic tunes for djs to draw from but which I could exercise some control over (once a tune got played a certain number of times, I could retire it for a while). --eric

(Responding to all your comments) Thanks a lot for the responses. Here's my responses to responses: From what I hear, the programming gurus who work for NPR are working hard on developiong guidance for stations moving in the Adult Alternative direction. One thing they've found is that their news listeners have a great deal of affinity for AAA. I think the first sign of this is the increasing amount and range of entertainment coverage on the news programs themselves. Soon I think a lot of NPR stations are going to have a "tie in" music signal to go along with the news/cultural coverage (as Clinton points out). Personally I think sometimnes NPR pushes things a bit too far in the direction of pop, but I suppose they are feeling their way forward. I'd like to emphasize the Alternative part of Adult alternative, because I think that's more in line with our duty to serve, but it's getting really easy to be alternative because commercial music radio is so narrow anymore. We probably play more contemporary jazz (NOT the genre) than a lot of folks for a couple of reasons: our library is a bit patchy, and there's been a long standing dedication to playing current releases (which may be reissues, but these days tend more to be being working musicians). I've often thought of bringing the balance a bit more toward the classic, but haven't pulleed the trigger on that because it brings up some deep value conflicts for me. I think part of the reason for the mixed format here was the fact that a straight jazz format tended to have few vocals and throwing in folk and blues got you a couple of extra every hour. There seems to me to be a fair deal more vocal jazz releases now, though. I have an issue with many of them, though (see earthy/etherial, below). I try to do something like a 50/50 vocal instrumental balance, though usually I think we're probably more like 60/40 toward instrumentals. I don't think this is bad--as long as we get that human voice in there with some regularity. The "playing at work" thing definitely is a consideration for us, but the direction I've always thought to go is toward the earthy rather than toward the etherial. I figure if people want plain background music, there are other options out there for them, and I don't think this sort of use is going to get me the sort of loyalty I need to turn "listeners" (don't know what to call someone who isn't really listenening) into supporters. What we're looking for is a sound that rewards attention but doesn't absolutely command it. On Ben Allison and the Composer's Collective: we've spun stuff from this circle quite a bit, a lot of this music interests me personally quite a bit, and it seems to do well with listeners as an important ingredient to the overall sound. Though we're up and down on it, too. Some stuff does extremely well, others I can't really see my way clear to add. As one might expect, I suppose. On sophisticated bluegrass/newgrass and that stream of jam bandy sorta stuff: Yeah, if there's a zeitgeist up here, that's probably be where its at, and where some of my thinking ought to be going. On the Fantasy stuff: Cal Tjader (hero of my youth!), Groove Holmes and company are here and spinning. Great stuff, hope for more. If only we could get our hands on more Fantasy material, both reissue and newly discovered . . . --eric

Howdy- I am GM at a public station playing music in the far reaches of Northern Michigan. We've got a potential audience of 150,000 (and that'd probably be on the high side) we need to pay our own way, so we need a fair number of those folks to listen and give for the station to stay on the air. Research indicates that in order to get people to give, you need for them to listen to you a lot (average weekly time spent listening for successful stations generally runs about 8 hours). So, in order for the station to really get on its feet we've got to keep growing both our total listenership and our time spent listening. Our public radio "competition" is: an NPR classical station, an NPR news station, and a mixed classical/news/jazz NPR station, as well as a religious station. Right now we do a jazz mix (wide spectrum of jazz--though no AG), with a bit of folk, blues & world) in the day and mostly alt. rock at night. But, I'm always interested inhearing from musically knowledgable and curious folks about a) what would be cool to have in the jazz mix? b) what other things we ought to be getting to at night? c) is there anything else you have in mind that would be "mission fulfilling" (education and cultural enrichment) and viable withing the confines I outline above. Anyhow, I'd be interested in reading your thoughts if you cared to trouble yourself, --eric

I think there was a detail or a reworking of the posted Eric Drooker piece on the cover of Arturo Sandoval's last cd. --eric

Somewhere or other I've written a bit on this collection, too and I noted something akin to what Geoff observes about the way Nichols works in the trio format. My opinion was that Nichols and his compositions genrally sound better with the, um, more sensitive(?) Max Roach on board than with Blakey. With Blakey, Nichols seems to leave a lot of the transitional passages to the drummer and I don't think Blakey really was up to contributing at this level in Nichols's work, at least not on this date. I'd have to go back and listen closely again to give a better sense of what I mean. But what do other people think in terms of presenting Nichols's vision? Also: if you can't afford this set at the moment, Nichols's Bethlehem session "Love, Gloom, Cash, Love" is probably available at a decent price, and is also a good intro to Nichols. On technical stuff in reveiws: I'm a non-musician, but since I'm some kind of nut I've done things like get a rudimentary reading knowledge of music (since lost through disuse) in order to better understand Gunther Schuller. But I'd say whatever you write ought to be able to stand without the technical stuff (this is certainly true of Schuller's work). On the other hand, attention to detail and a vocabulary to talk about it are essential to good music writing. There is an old review of Schuller's Early Jazz in the Hudson Review by William Youngren which talks about these issues pretty intelligently, I think. I don't think this is available on the internet, but a decent academic library should have a copy. --eric

Just wanted to follow up on this I am certainly on board with Chuck on this one. Jurgen Habermas wrote some very good stuff on the economic crisis of the seventies/early eighties, Legitimation Crisis, I think, is one where he gets serious into the interaction between the sputtering of the economic system and ideological and cultural issues. Definitely worth checking out.

Randy- I will definitely make a point of it. And now I've gotta go because I said I was in this archived public forum. See you there, --eric PS: Again, thanks for that push on the Chown record: just what the doctor ordered.

I think JSngry and I have either discovered we agree or have agreed to respectfully disagree about all possible issues here. (?) Unless someone wants to propose another way into this (in which case I suppose I can still counterpuch), I think I'm out of words (beleive it or not) Thanks to all you Oragnissimites? Orangatangs? (especially to JSngry) for the tolerance and the "frank exchange of viewpoints." I think I wasn't careful and that I learned something. Hope this all wasn't just plain tiresome. If so, an extra helping of gratitude and a free beer if you ever end up at this end of the earth. --eric

I made two animated gifs (inspired by this thread) and mirrored them. You stared at that for 15 minutes? Respect! What were you staring at when your photo was taken? At the prospect of a future of true socialism, of mutual respect and an end to alienation . . . Actually, at a fire extinguisher outlet in the ceiling which I was imagining sprinkling water onto the brand new board which cost us 10K. --eric

we are at wnmc.org. All kinds of kooks from way up north play music from all over the damned place. That's our tagline. --eric