Dr. Rat

No "leaden" seems to be a weird thing to call Dick. He has his faults certainly, and a fair many bad moments, but he could write very well in a plain style if you asked me, and was quite good at developing character by narrating in a characters own language. (We might observe the "oriental" turn to the way characters think in Man in the High Castle.) Perhaps this sometimes comes off as a bit awkward? But he isn't reaching for beauty of language, he's reaching for a language that resonates with how someone might think. --eric

Congratulations! --eric

Shouldn't but usually does, unfortunately. At least that's been my experience. Good free form is rarer than most good things. I've heard a lot of it that you wouldn't be able to distinguish from a shuffle with segue software. I've heard a lot of it you wouldn't be able to distinguish from formatted radio. I've heard some of it you wouldn't be able to distinguish from exquisite torture. I've heard some of it that was genius. That's the usual argument against all mixed formats. My own theory is that people who want and expect jazz and jsut jazz now have many options aside from broadcast, so in the long run it's not a fight worth fighting. I'm shooting for more of that personal experience Jim mentioned, but with some lines on the road to (hopefully) avoid the serious pitfalls of true freeform. That, I'm hoping, is a fight worth fighting. --eric

And point well taken. No anger there I shouldn't think. By this time we are all so used to each others contrariness we needn't get angry. The fact that people are "disputing" is testimony to the value of the post. Wait until you post something and NO ONE replies! That's when you feel like you've wasted your time. So your post inspired something--maybe not exactly what you wanted, but still, it's something, modest as may be. Anyhow, having worked in newspaper journalism, you would be amazed at what even editors don't know. For instance, who Miles Davis is and how anyone else might be expected to know who the hell you are talking about. So if you want to write about him and not do the "introducing Miles Davis" routine, you end up talking about him as a pop icon first and foremost. So Miles may have been considered to have been an innovator after Birth of the Cool, but by whom? Certainly not by your average WSJ reader. It's kind of like writing about Umberto Eco. Where do you start? Prominent semiotician and literary critic turned novelist? Or do you just start with the Name of the Rose and go from there? The answer for the vast majority of mass market editors is clear: no one gives a damn about his prominence in specialist fields, everyone cares about his fame. Not that you ignore the rest, but that the context you are writing about Eco in is a mass market context, and that's the primary frame of reference for the whole piece. There is a certain craft to this kind of writing which makes people comfortable with the scant knowledge they already have while at the same time making them feel they ought to know more about Miles Davis than they already do. One thing this means is that you don't shower readers with all kinds of accurate information they don't know yet and look upon as trivial. That's a sure way to make people stop reading. The context for this kind of writing is what is already between the ears of the reader, not truth as perceived by the mind of God. It doesn't really pay to get too nit-picky with the tactics used to get readers from a state of woeful ignorance to one of functional literacy and curiosity for more: if there are outrageous falsehoods, that's one thing. But when it's a matter of something as nebulous as when (and by whom) Miles Davis was considered to be an innovator . . . well, it doesn't much matter. I write this as someone who has gotten this lecture repeatedly from editors who may have been culturally illiterate, but who were very good at relating to their readers. And then there's the matter of what Davis's contributions to the Birth of the Cool sessions really were, but we'll leave that to the side. --eric

Not your fault you're missing it, I quoted the wrong post! Should have been Guy's.

I've done free form, and was fairly good at it if I do say so myself. But I found that there was something . . . kind of empty in it after a while. And when I've listened other people doing it I've often had the sense that it was very little different from iPod shuffle with an eclectic colletion of mp3s. If you listened to the station I'm at now, you wouldn'tthink we're terribly structured. A lot of people listen and can't tell what the format is! And I'm completely comfortable about that. But I also am a firm believer that a degree of format structure makes for better radio. "Structured" oughtn't be thought of only as "restricting," it is also that which opens up the possibility for conveying all kinds of new shades of feeling and meaning. Language, for instance, is highly structured, but our range of expression is hugely increased by imposing that structure. Structure is a business of excluding and including, so some stuff gets left out, but some stuff gets left out no matter what. I find that having obligations--to have a financially viable radio station, to please the audience, to fulfill format duties, etc.--is inspiring to me: it makes me do a better job of presenting the music and makes the experience better for everybody. --eric

But when Miles Davis was playing international playboy and superstar in the 1970s, he was riding on the success of . . . his Prestige Recordings? And your typical WSJ reader knows Davis how? This wasn't written for an audience of jazz historians, but for an audience rather casually aware of jazz as a pop cultural/artistic phenomenon. Meaning the pre-Columbia Davis is pretty much below the radar. --eric

kchu:

I can see your point in regard to UNT: considering their role in jazz education, I'd say they'd have a greater obligation on the "representing the form" side of things than your typical public radio station. A lot of the fact that the station doesn't represent jazz more fully may have to do with funding: if the University is getting stingy with money, the station has to start looking at some of the "tried and true" methods for generating more revenue, and making the programming more consistently middle-of-the-road is one of those. The professionalizing of the dj corps is another. And strict playlisting. In short, playing to a fit audience though even fewer that public radio would draw in any case requires a considerable subsidy. But for me the fun of the business is trying to do something that will get a fairly big audience and still be good. --eric

How about a chorus of "Happy Birthday to me" on the harmonica? --eric

That's for sure. ← Yes here at Organissimo you get red/blue, the Wynton debate AND Mac/Windows. If we get started on jewel case vs. digipak we'll have all the great contentious debates of our times under one roof. --eric

Anyone have experience with the cheap Linux boxes that are on the market? --eric

Are you taking the fifth or giving it? Or giving it to suggest that I take it. Or should have taken it. I'm not supposed to take amendments from stangers, but I suppose since we've argued about jazz and God, we've moved beyond that point. --eric

Right, I was talking about people calling to discuss music or programming choices, not idiots, lunatics or monomaniacs. On the hiding the Ornette records: I've done similar things, and I don't think it's a terrible thing. There are a few people out there who like to hear ornette on the radio, but lots more who do not. But the people who DO want to hear him will call and request him far out of proportion to their numbers. Same goes for cover songs, Bad Plus, songs with political content, Alice's Restaurant, So What, What a Wonderful World, etc. etc. Sometimes I as manager have to take steps to make sure that a few interested individuals and/or naive djs don't end up alienating the majority of the listeners. In some cases that means getting stuff out of the studio. In my view the station has to reflect the preferences of the broad listenership, not those of djs and the relatively few people who call. That's what managers are for. Are we wrong sometimes? sure. That's one of the reasons I don't hang up on people who disagree with me. They just might be right. --eric

I'm of a mind that the word "compromise" gets a bad rap. For me compromise is the essence of communication, and even compromise for financial reasons does not necessarily have reason to hide its head. It all depends on how it turns out, not on what mix of motivations led to the final product. --eric

art is about compromise, those are dangerous words Dr. ← Don't you think it is though? --eric

I've been away for a while, but I read this thread with interest, so I thought I might throw my two-cents in as someone who works in the field. Just to let it be known: I am not really responding directly to any one person here, just using the comments of others as a taking off point to write a bit on a topic I've thought about a lot over the years. There definitely IS a disdain for purists in the radio field (you sometimes see them called SPERM: Self-Proclaimed Exerperts in Radio and Music). The disdain is at least partially deserved: purists call a lot to tell me things I already know or which are perfectly obvious to everyone. They make completely impossible demands (for instance, that everyone on air know how to pronounce everyone's name), they care about things that really don't matter very much, and they think the radio station ought to be their personal jukeboxes. Such people, however, are rare. Most listeners are very considerate, they understand that their preferences and opinions, no matter how well informed, represent a relatively small thing when compared to the preferences and opinions of tens of thousands of listeners. Hanging up on listeners who want to discuss music and programming is just way out of bounds in my book. I would not pay someone to behave in such a manner, and I'm not sure I'd let them volunteer, even. Personally, I love having people like Jim out there listening, and I appreciate the criticism offered. Usually when infomed folks know the situation WE (one full time employee, a relatively green group of volunteer programmers, etc. etc.) are in, infomred critics become informed helpers. Our current Jazz Director started as someone who called in often to correct my mispronunciations. And that is the glory of community radio. There is still a long way to go in developing jazz radio in a more viable and positive direction. Right now there seems to me to be a split between the pre-1980 attitude (who cares if anyone listens, this is great) and the David Giovannoni attitude (there's no difference between "service" and ratings). My own notion is that public radio service is a function of both the quality of the programming and quantity of people that programming reaches. If no one listens, the greatest programming in the world does no service. If everyone listens to Rush Limbaugh, you have made the world a worse, not a better, place. The point I would try to make with the folks who seem to care ONLY for quality is that radio is a mass medium: it quite simply isn't right to use the public airwaves to broadcast programming that hardly anyone will benefit from. Especially when most of the people who DO listen have lots of disposable income to go out and buy the music in question themselves. So there is a contradiction when radio is disdianed for programming in a way that draws more listeners. That is what radio is for: to reach relatively big audiences. So when you design a jazz program, the first question is "How do I do I present jazz in a way that is both culturally enriching for the community and financially viable for the station?" You don't ask "What are my favorites?" or "What do I think other people ought to be compelled to listen to?" For me art is about compromise (between inspiration and the limits of form, between creatior and audience, between competing motives). The art of radio is a creative compromise between the desire to expand the audience (for both financial and service reasons) and the desire to express oneself aesthetically. Those who can't bring themselves to accept this sort of compromise should look for anothe rmedium to patronize. As far as uninformed DJs go: I've found that people who are interested and knowledgible about jazz, desirous of being on the radio, and reasonably qualified to do it are getting pretty thin on the ground these days. From my point of view if they are playing Count Basie and trying to learn, all is well. What harm is really done if they say Bassie anyhow? Someone equally naive may come in for an embarassing moment, but that's life. --eric

We played this quite a bit. A similar album is Sidewalk Glance, which has Wycliffe Gordon and Miri Ben-Ari. Occasionally this cd sounds as if it could have used more of what gordon brought, but all in all very worthwhile. --eric

Cool, yes, just what I was looking for. And "Christiern" needn't feel obliged to use scarequotes around "rat." I'm sure most people here know that I am not actually a rat, or a doctor, though I may have some qualities that Edward G. Robinson would say were "rat-like." But we can all just assume a certain level of onotological uncertainty, and dispense with a couple of keystrokes, whataya say? --eric

A good friend of mine was writing his dissertation on PKD. I ended up reading a lot of his stuff just so we could tell our wives that our late night drinking sessions were by way of dissertation brainstorming! But he's a strange case in terms of "literary value." Sometimes he descends to the level of pulp crap, his female characters can be really awful, but I think he is unsupassed at revealing the depths of the lower-middle-class schmo. --eric

I agree -- the more I think about it, Bowen should have really gotten it for (mostly) shutting down Rip, and then making crucial plays when switched to Chauncey. Bigtime PF's have a way of choking in these big series, so to be fair to TD at least he's won a championship (unlike Barkley and Malone). Guy ← Well, I don't think Duncan is "great," but the hype isn't his fault, he's just a sportswriters' darling. But he's better than some of you guys are letting on. You have to consider he was playing against a team that was very very well equipped to stop him and very determined to do so. A truly great player may have found a way of having more of an impact on the series. But Duncan's team won, and I've seen Jabbar and Olajawan look irrelevant, too. --eric

Interesting article GB. It was after the "ugly" 94 Knicks/Rockets that they stopped hand checking, wasn't it? What could they do next year? --eric

I expect a very very good game, but I voted Spurs. I think they're really the more talented team, and I expect they'll show it tonight, esp. with their being home. No disrespect to the Pistons, though. Always an admirer of Larry Brown coached teams--I just don't think they've quite got it this year. I look forward to the game, and being a Sixers fan (save your expressions of sympathy) I am relatively neutral. As long as the game is good. --eric

Yeah, I'm sure everyone is busy. But one does begin to wonder whether Russell is more disliked than inaccurate. --eric

What, Plainfield is South Plainfield? I did read the thread. In that context (or any context), my post was obviously not intended as exhaustive directions. But, hey, if you wanna play nit-picky, go for it. I'm sure I misspelled something, too. --eric