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I generally rip jazz CDs at 224 and classical at 256. But I also am not as constrained by space considerations as I actually mostly listen while at work off of a laptop. I've been debating getting one of the really cheap players (not iPod) for listening on the train but haven't gotten to it.

Classical musicians (& composers too) have the same problem - lack of jobs. There was a series of articles in the NY Times a few years ago about how most folks who went to the big music schools in NY didn't even end up working in the business. Once a musician gets a job in an orchestra or teaching in the school, they hold on to it for life. So there isn't much room for anybody else.... Could definitely say the same thing about higher education, particularly PhDs in the humanities. Things are slightly better in social sciences, sciences and engineering. But now in English students coming out with a brand new PhD have less than a 50% chance of landing a tenure track position at a 4 year university. It's probably slightly better for history and geography, considerably worse for philosophy and languages. So some schools are belatedly cutting down on the number of grad students they accept, but this is kind of a vicious circle as it really undercuts morale in these departments. Maybe it was unrealistic for academe to escape market pressures, but they have certainly caught up big time. In general, it is becoming clear that if you aren't going to participate in the market economy as a wage slave, you will have less than a 50% chance of pursuing your dreams as a musician, as a historian, as a scholar, and you will be severely punished if you fail. In general, I think a really creative individual starting out now wouldn't choose to become a jazz musician (obviously there are certain exceptions), but it is too much like working in a dead or least frozen language. And certainly part of this is opportunities in other areas. I'm trying to remember if it was Ben Webster or someone else that said when he was starting out, if you were an ambitious Black man there were three avenues to pursue: music, the church and pimping. That's not really the case anymore. The church is probably roughly as lucrative, and drugs have largely but not entirely supplanted pimping. The military, athletics, rap, web design are all far more stable and lucrative careers than being a jazz musician. I imagine that a lot of well-meaning people get into jazz via school, but they simply are not the cream of the crop the way they would have been a couple of generations ago (if jazz curriculum existed in the same way). I'm sure there will be a handful of isolated geniuses that are driven to express themselves in jazz, but for the most part I think they have gone elsewhere.

If you're stupid enough to post damaging and even criminal goings on on the web, you just have very poor judgement. And this might carry over into work. I know a lawyer who got canned for what she had written in an email (can't recall if it was a work email or personal email). The problem is that young people make very poor decisions all the time. It is part of growing up, but now the evidence is there floating about forever (nothing really disappears on the Web).

PM sent.

I sense a rematch!

PM sent on the Basie Roulette.

Exactly my behavior and sentiments. It is getting really boring -- the spats and the sticking up for the boorish behavior of others. I recall the last major split was maybe a year ago over the US style "free speech" vs. European consensus approach. The Board bounced back. I'm not as sure now, since the disagreement do seem more personal and pointed. Or maybe the direction the board is going in seems a lot less interesting to me. Is it just there is so little activity on the new music and reissue front, that all we can do is moan about 50 year public use doctrine and the death of the majors and whether they are related. It could also be personal, in that I feel a lot more urgency to finish up some of my own projects and am disengaging more to get more time for that. But it certainly doesn't feel like the O Board I joined several years ago. That said, I think it wiser to follow Brownie's lead and not add even more drama to the mix.

How was this one? The commercials crack me up. Damn...I didn't know you could quote two people in one post! It was pretty good, but I think I had a whole different appreciation to some of it due to 27 years of state agency experience. I wasn't impressed, mostly because it seems like an Office clone simply transplanted to a govt. bureacracy (even the follow-up one-on-one interviews to the camera). Blah. Now if they end up tackling things like workers that never show up but can't be disciplined because of union rules or the farce that is the govt. requisition process or budgeting (including the orgy of spending that occurs in the last couple of weeks of a fiscal year), then they might be onto something. It would be nice if it grows, but to me it seems far too close to its source material. OTOH, if indeed they are setting the Amy Poehler character up for some wicked parody of Ikiru (she's trying to build a playlot in a completely inappropriate location), well that would be comedy that works on a couple of levels.

Big Bang Theory, Season 1 Pretty amusing to me. I was very much like these guys in high school and the first couple of years of college, including the general clueness about social interaction (not that this isn't always a struggle).

Very, very sorry to hear this VB. I have a quite similar story, though we weren't jerked around by the hospital so much. My mother was struck down by an aneurysm at work. They rushed her to a hospital, and the surgeons did what they could to stabilize her, but huge portions of her brain was gone. Later the doctors confided that it was for the best that she died within the week, as she would never have truly recovered from the trauma and would simply have been in a vegitative state for the rest of her life, and it would have been hell on the survivors. As they waited to see what would happen post-surgery, we had roughly a week to stay in the hospital by her side, just talking, reading to her, etc. It was definitely not enough, but still a little peace. I'm somewhat comforted by the fact that we were very close and I didn't have any unfinished business with her, as so many people do with their parents. There will be plenty of rough patches ahead, but you'll pull through. The most important thing is to continue to live in a way that would make her proud. Best of luck.

Well, if they can charge the same for the stereo and mono box sets, there's no need. From what I've been reading, the new remasters will be busy. New liner notes, new photos, then some video appended to the CDs themselves. Curiously, Apple will bundle all the new video files onto a stand-alone DVD, probably trying to capture casual fans like myself who are clearly not going to buy all the remasters.

Pretty complicated as always. This year I didn't sell a house (seems like every other year) so the Schedule D was marginally less complicated. Had massive schedule D losses on various investments but those mostly will have to be carried forward to 2009. This year my wife did enough Secret Shopping as an "independent contractor" that we had to include the Self-Employment Tax and Schedule C-EZ. Anyway, feds owed me about $700 and I owed the state $350, so pretty close to a wash. A lot closer than many years.

Maybe he should join the Board -- sounds like he would fit in.

Problem is when they stand together to bow as part of their fourth curtain call, someone will flash a picture. The resulting ego rush will change the localized gravitational force, triggering a micro-implosion in the concert hall. Hundreds missing or dead.

Mono & stereo on separate discs. The monos will be only sold in as a box set. ... No accounting for taste. I do think they may be overestimating the market for re-issues. On the other hand, Beatles' fans are a large market, and even picking up 5% of this market would be better than most current artists. I do, however, think they would do a lot better if they broke the box sets in half, so you could get mono through Revolver, say, I think that would do a lot better in sales than expecting people to get all the albums, even Let It Be, in mono.

Actually more young 'uns are gravitating to vinyl now. Inexpensive USB turntables make it possible to rip cheap used LPs they find at garage/car boot sales, and many new vinyl releases by indie bands include a way to legally download mp3s with the purchase. So the cool kids already own their Beatles and won't be buying the remasters. I think we're still talking 5% up from 3%. It's very easy to magnify how important/common buying CDs and even more so LPs is within our own echo chamber. (I'm not sure I know anyone with more than 500 CDs, except on the board where the median collection is probably 2000+. I just read a piece that Disney felt that saturation had been reached now that most families had around 80 DVDs. Clearly some fanatics have far more than that (including many of us here) but the vast majority of people do not collect DVDs or even CDs this way, and that's where the money was and is no longer.) CDs and vinyl are really fading away, being replaced with digital (both legal and mostly illegal).

My guess is that it will be a split decision (especially on the SH board!) on whether they actually sound better, but they will sound different than what we have now. If your frame of reference is the CDs (as it is for me), I really don't think there is any benefit to getting the remasters. It will just mess with your head. The only Beatles I've heard on LP was Sgt. Pepper's. I'm happy with the sound on the CDs and that's what I listened to all through college, etc. Not saying that this project is an abomination or anything, I just don't see any value for me. I do seriously wonder if Apple is misjudging things though -- I think the target audience here is in their late 50s to 60s, and this group is really starting to wind down its CD buying. No not us on the board or SH Board but we are such outliers it is a little scary. And truly the next generation or two below me (Z?) isn't going to buy anything at all. It will be all torrents all the time. We'll see how well that works out.

Given that I just bought Hard Day's Night yesterday, I'm probably not their target audience. I finally have the core CDs (the UK versions), and they sound fine to me. I'm certainly not going to run out and get remastered versions, which will forevermore sound a bit off to me. In fact, I'm pretty unlikely to buy anything more except Let It Be on DVD if that ever comes out. But the real question is now how are you going to get the Sgt. Pepper's inserts? I bought my copy on CD back in the long-box era (remember that?) and they actually printed these in slightly reduced size on the back of the box. I clipped the box out and just the other day ran across this. Even this is slightly deflating, but to cut this down by another 50% or spread it across the pages of a CD insert just kind of defeats the purpose.

Pepper Adams - Urban Dreams John Surman - Private City The Beatles - A Hard Day's Night I consider myself a moderate Beatles' fan (they are really more my parents' generation, though I have most of their albums) but it still shocked me recently to realize I'd never heard Hard Day's Night all the way through. I had seen the film though, so that should count for something.

Probably like everyone else, they thought they could limp along and "manage" the crisis. Now with the financial markets crashing, they probably find that given the future prospects of the newspaper industry (bleak), they can't even get financing on the previous (relatively sweet) terms. Why are so many other papers going bust all at the same time? Probably a combination of financing problems and just something in the water that things are never going to turn around.

See this news should have been relayed yesterday or tomorrow, as no one will believe it is not part of a prank. So tell us again on April 2. We'll be around.

I just ordered all three as well. Keeping my fingers crossed! greg mo ARG--I was too late. Out of stock again. God, but Dusty can be frustrating as hell. They could reserve some copies for at least a few days! And why don't they do back orders? GRRRRR! greg mo Agreed, though in this case Amazon does have them for a bit more and free shipping if you got all of them. I was pretty surprised when I saw them on the shelves. The guy said they had literally come in two hours earlier. So I've listened to the Anachronic Jazz Band, which is highly amusing, sort of along the lines of one of Mozart's music jokes. But I'm not steeped enough in Mozart's times to get most of his jokes (and just have to read about them) whereas this was genuinely funny to someone like me who knows bebop well and has at least a passing familiarity with trad. jazz. As far as I can tell, the set has all of their first two LPs Open 02 and Open 09. The second disc is all live (including a couple of tracks cut in Germany!). It appears that roughly half of the live LP with Beryl Bryden is included as tracks 7-14 (and maybe track 19 from CD 1). Curiously, only one of the three tracks with Beryl is actually included: "Fattening Frogs." It appears 4 cuts from that LP are not included: "Running Wild", "Bonnie's Tune", "One Million Dollar Secret" and probably a live version of "Joy Spring." Well, it would have been nice to have everything, but this is a nice set. Didn't really have a chance to listen to the Crolla yet.

Problem is that there are different numbers on front/spine and then the back. I think most of us will go for the number on front and spine. So Crolla becomes 04, Jean-Marie is 05 and Anachronic Jazz Band is 06. Oops, Crolla may have 06 on the front, but I am pretty sure it does have 04 on the spine. I'll check again tonight. It's really only a problem for the truly obsessed.

Hey, they just showed up at DG!! I was actually there kind of on a whim (since I didn't think they would release until tomorrow). So I snagged mine, and I think they have 4 or 5 more copies of each of the 3 sets. Still don't have that last Grappelli, but this will be awfully nice to listen to tonight.