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I think in the end it works out to 5 CDs of Duke's material and 3 of Ella. There are probably a few performances of her singing with his group but not too many. Here's a promotional blurb -- maybe she sings more with Duke than I remember. Anyway, some really nice music. The price is a little high - can't remember what I paid - but when you figure in shipping a used copy, it works out about the same.

I've barely watched any of Season 1 and 2. It's good news, but I think I'll hold off until I've caught up with past purchases. Maybe I missed it in the thread but Looney Tunes vol. 3 came out and is excellent. There's a DVD of all the Hollywood parodies, including The House that Jack Built (Jack Benny) and The Honeymousers.

I'm with you on Koons. He's a case where at least I can respect the idea but the art is so (purposely) mundane. While I don't like all of Wall's work, I do like his photo based on Invisible Man and a fairly recent photo taken/constructed of an apartment in Japan (I think). I do like some of Rauschenberg and Johns work quite a bit. I like John's work in the 1990s, particularly a series based around the Four Seasons theme (ironically the same theme found in some of the only Cy Twombly work I enjoy). Rauschenberg does make ugly color choices for his constructs, but some of them are still very interesting -- and quite witty in an inside art kind of way. I would recommend getting to the Met in New York to see a show of dozens of his constructs. Seeing them all together helped me appreciate them more. I think I will put together a list of major art exhibits I really liked, but it will take a while.

Thinking of Allen's list, I thought this might be the place to discuss visual artists you dislike. I should say up front that I like a lot of art, even much contemporary art, but there is also much I can't stand. (Maybe I will make the more positive artists I like list at some other point, though that would be sort of blog-gy given how long it would be.) For me, bad artists potentially fall into several categories: 1) Artists who make some piece so hideous it overshadows the rest of their work 2) Artists who go through an extremely bad phase and may or may not recover from it (De Chirico) 3) Artists who become extremely successful/over-exposed and in turn start cranking out inferior work (Dali, Warhol) or carbon copies of past work (Frank Gehry - ok so he's an architect) 4) Artists who appear to have no technical abilities whatsoever but are expressing some idea 5) Artists who have no ability and their idea is so lame that I could have come up with it 6) Artists who make ugly, trivial or boring work I think #4 is a tricky category and it depends on whether I find the idea reasonably interesting and the trade-off with how poor the art is. I can see the point behind most of Cy Twombly's work (taking schoolboy scribbles and turning them into canvases), but I still dislike most of his work intensely except for a few pieces hanging in the MOMA. Not a fan of Tracey Emin either. I was seriously disappointed when I finally saw Ad Reinhardt's work, but I don't hate him. I was also really disappointed with how trivial most of Richard Tuttle's work was at the Whitney show, but again it doesn't rise to disliking the artist. I suppose the artists I dislike the most fall into #5 and #6. Dan Flavin - boring and pretentious - absolutely the worst show of 2004 Jean Dubuffet - ugly art - yes I know it is art brut but I still find it so ugly. There are only a handful of street scenes I find tolerable. Ed Rushcha's starting to bore me, and will probably move higher on the list of disliked artists. Well, it's late, and that's all I can think of for the moment.

Am now about 1/2 through At Lady Molly's, which is the 4th novel in Anthony Powell's Dance to the Music of Time. I think this is where the series really picks up some momentum. That's not to say it is a chore reading the earlier books. I started to appreciate them about 25 pages into book 1. There is a detached wit in the observations of characters. What is interesting, and clearly part of the construction of the series, that friends fall away and return with the ebb and flow of time. This seems particularly true of this class of English (educated at Oxbridge) and living in London, so they do still run into each other from time to time. The interweaving of people through marriage and other alliances/dalliances seems almost suffocating at times. I wonder a few things. Are there contemporary settings that have the same layeredness, either in the US or UK? The places that strike me the most likely are still London or New York, since people who have made it some scene in either place are extremely reluctant to leave. Also, academic communities have considerable continuity (among the professors at any rate) that one doesn't seem to find in other settings. Some of the old tropes of fiction (long-standing grudges in particular) just don't seem as relevant in contemporary US where there is still such mobility. I suppose I am a bit of an exception, but I've made 4 or 5 moves of over 500 miles, depending on how you count them, and make smaller moves almost every year. Almost none of my old friends are living where I originally met them. And yet virtually all sitcoms depend on the same crowd showing up and dealing with the same things, year in year out. Would it be possible to create a tv program that really reflected this unrootedness or would that just be emotionally unsatisfying? In some small way, Seinfeld approaches this, with George's many jobs and the transitory nature of all relationships outside the core four plus familiy (and Newmann). I suppose most of the non-sitcom shows have shake-ups among the staff. I suppose it comes down to television comedy requiring familiarity not required by comic or semi-comic novels. But maybe I am simply expecting an unreasonable amount of uprootedness -- most sitcoms that go past five years have some personnel changes (for spinoffs if nothing else) -- MASH, Taxi, All in the Family, LA Law, Barney Miller -- and that may be a much more representative example of how frequently most people move than expecting changes every few episodes. Anyway, to get back to the book, there are a few really amusing characters, particularly this titled character who has adopted radical politics but still can't go the last step and turn his estate over to the masses. I'm still feeling that this is closest to a modernized version of Trollope's The Pallisers.

I have maybe 1/3 of my core collection backed up (the Mosaics and a few other box sets (including Jazz in Paris) and my favorite artists), but there is a long way to go. And I've filled up a 250 Gig hard drive! Partly I simply save at too high a sample rate, partly I have a lot of music. Could I live with just the music on the hard drive? Probably, though that is not exactly in the spirit of the question. This quickly leads us back to the morality issue of CDRs, dubs, etc. What would I do if I had to sell off my collection and not keep back-up copies? A much, much harder question. The pieces I would be most interested in keeping until the bitter end are the Mosaics, and they're about the only thing with any resale value. I'd probably get rid of the rest of my vinyl first, then CDs I haven't listened to in the last two or three years. I think I'd probably do better selling off my book collection, which is mostly social science and urban studies books, and probably has a slightly higher resale value.

I see it has been released in the US and a UK release is scheduled for March. It's amazing how studios can settle their legal differences when there is money to be made. The Pink Panther cartoons are also finally being released in the US now that the Steve Martin movie tie-in is ready. (Unfortunately, it will probably suck like all post-Sellers Panther movies.) In some respects The Party and the Pink Panther films (particularly the later ones) are quite similar. Mayhem, funny accents, etc. Maybe I find just enough of a plot in the Pink Panther movies that I am not bored they way I was with The Party. Anyway, I do like much of Sellers' work with Dr. Strangelove at the very top of the list. He's also in Kubrick's Lolita. I like the idea of Being There a bit more than the actual movie, but I was young when I saw it and should give it another chance. For these roles alone, he would be considered as a great comic actor, though I suppose he wouldn't have become a legend without the Inspector Clouseau role. What I find interesting about Sellers' roles is that he moved from a fairly restrained lunacy in the British movies (I'm All Right, Jack; Ladykillers; Carlton-Browne of the F.O.) to over-the-top silliness and crazy outfits after the success of Shot in the Dark/The Pink Panther. This could be effective but sometimes was just too much and his talents might have been served better if he had been reigned in a bit (I'm thinking of The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu in particular). I'm realizing as I look at his movies that I really haven't seen most of his work from the 1970s, so I don't know if I would like it or not.

I must be one of the few people to really hate The Party.* Just thought it dragged on and on and on. Oh look at Sellars' character create mayhem, oh there he breaks another lamp, then he gets people to fall in the pool. What little plot there was was so cliched. * As long as I am being contrary, I also hate The Stunt Man (and Rope) for plots that lack conviction. They are supposed to be so daring and yet have completely conventional endings. Dr. Strangelove and Harold and Maud are so much better for not ending with typical Hollywood happy endings.

Shoot, I want one of these. I bought all four of those JiP boxes, but I guess I bought them too early.

I hear you, but I am still not sure that Columbia would have marketed Monk or Mingus to the same extent, to try to push them to #1 jazz icon. They filled other niches well -- the eccentric genius niche, for example, as well as the Angry Black musician (of course Miles had a piece of this too). Maybe I am attributing too much cleverness to the marketeers. Maybe they just gave Miles a bit of an extra push, but he spoke to a vast audience (everything up to Bitches Brew) and did the rest on his own and it became a self-perpetuating machine. It would be interesting to rerun history to see who the labels would have promoted in the absence of Miles and whether it would have worked, but I'm certainly glad we have his music.

Maybe already mentioned, but Henry Grimes Trio (on ESP) is available as well as two ESP discs by Burton Greene (who apparently could have been the next Miles Davis if he had just gotten the same marketing push, according to another thread ) and three Sonny Simmons CDs (two on ESP).

That's cool. Many Naxos Jazz Cds are available as well. International shipping is available but quite steep. I used to put in a big order with Daedalus every few months but haven't in a long time now.

I'm so frigging sick of trademarks and protecting slogans. Anything that a 12 year old can think of (like 3peat or 12th man) is way too common to be granted a trademark. I think I heard the other day that Paris Hilton is trying to trademark "It's Hot." We're literally carving up the English language and giving it away to corporate entities for no good reason whatsoever (so what else is new).

I'm sure much of the frustration evident in this thread emerges from the fact that jazz is a niche market, and there only appears to be room for one or two "public faces of jazz" at any one time. Who gets to represent jazz. (Actually this is related to, but a slightly different issue of who does the public immediately think of when you say "name a jazz musician". This topic is closer to the original query, I think.) It's particularly frustrating when that public face was Wynton. For a brief nanosecond, it looked like it was going to be Joshua Redman for a while. I honestly don't know who it would be now. The one small mercy is that smooth jazz has hived off, and many people understand that Mr. G is not the spokesman for jazz. I think we shouldn't underestimate marketing. You can in fact lead the public to almost anything once. People will buy KOB, and it is a good album and they will often seek out more. Columbia has these fliers that list every possible Miles CD and compilation that goes into every copy of KOB. I don't see that extended marketing push for any other jazz musician on Columbia. Impulse does make a similar push with Coltrane, however. I don't begrudge Miles his status, but I do think there are a handful of other artists who could have fit the bill with a similar marketing effort -- to me the most likely candidates would have been Art Blakey or Lee Morgan. (Mingus and Monk being too unstable to be elevated to the "ultimate jazz icon" status.) Obviously it would have been easier to do this if Miles hadn't been around. Maybe they wouldn't have been the whole package -- the cool and the hot together, the take-no-prisoners attitude, the multiple styles and genre hopping. But I think another jazz icon would have emerged. But maybe not.

My only real problem with the poll is that I find it heavy-handed. Ok, there may be a handful of people in #1 and #3 but not too many. Almost all of us fall into #2 and rationalize it (or not) in various ways. I'd be more interested in finding out something about people's boundaries (yes to PD labels but no to Napster, yes to borrowing a copy from a friend, no to ripping every CD in the public library, yes to OOP material unless it is from Mosaic, etc.). Not interested enough however to set up one more poll about it. I'm almost interested enough to ask if people would still use yourmusic/BMG and/or emusic/iTunes if musicians (or estates) didn't get royalties. However, I think this topic is played out for another few months (for me at any rate).

Some great deals, but they don't ship outside US/Canada.

I reject your questions and substitute my own. That way we can both be satisfied. But I agree with Rooster Ties that this poll is defined so narrowly that probably no one can honestly answer #1. I can't. I'm just saying that if yourmusic doesn't actually turn into royalties for the artists, then it's unfortunate and maybe we ought to be aware of it. How about when you pay but not enough for music, like at the dodgy AllofMp3 site or other Russian MP3 sites? They appear to be just barely legal under Russian law, and there are conflicting opinions on whether you can "import" these MP3s into other countries. Probably illegal under US or UK law. Probably legal under Canadian law. A lot of people go frothing off at the mouth about the EU PD labels, because the artists and original labels get ripped off. But they're perfectly legal in the EU and now that I live here, it's legal for me to own the stuff, and I certainly pay for it.

Maybe things have changed, but I remember reading that many musicians' contracts for the major labels from the 1980s and 1990s explicitly said that review and promo copies were to be excluded for the purposes of calculating royalties. Maybe reasonable, until the fine print said that all CDs sold through music clubs such as BMG and I would assume yourmusic were counted as promo copies. So that is a hefty chunk of change that wasn't going to the artists. Again, maybe things have improved, but I kind of doubt it. So impossible could very well be correct that musicians are getting screwed everytime we buy from yourmusic. What kind of royalties does the average musician in a typical contract with the majors get from iTunes or emusic downloads? I don't know. I don't even know that it would change my buying patterns, but it is something to consider before getting on one's high horse about how legal your own practices are. It's possible to be legal and still be contributing to unethical practices. Or conversely one might well believe that the current extensions of copyright in the US are unethical towards consumers, since they were retroactively imposed for the benefit of a very few. Personally, I see the world as a very grey place.

Only a few weeks ago I became aware of Jacques Loussier, who does jazz (or jazz-inspired) renditions of Bach and other classical composers. Unfortunately, due to a screw up on BBC radio, the last 10 minutes of his Brandenburg Concerto 5 was cut off. I don't know if this London concert was released, but it may be the same as the version on a DVD of his just released. Anyway, I am thinking of picking up some of his CDs. I think the natural thing would be if there was a box set of his Play Bach 1-5, but this does not exist. www.zweitausendeins.de has the next best thing - a 3 CD set that draws on this and some other recordings (unfortunately I wasn't aware of this when I ordered from them recently and don't have anything else to combine with the order). I am a bit amazed that this doesn't appear to be available in the US or UK, where the best of sets are only two CDs. I haven't checked amazon.fr yet. So I'm wondering if people have any of his recordings and would recommend any particular starting point. Thanks!

I actually go to this museum every couple of months. It wasn't me though. It's a damn shame, but really what a stupid place to put priceless vases. The Guardian has a pretty good blog on whether you the reader has broken anything priceless. It gets kind of stupid 3/4 of the way through, but until then some priceless and sad stories of average folks with the fumblies. Guardian Blog I have broken a few things through the years, but the only valuable things were my own and not someone else's which makes it a little better.

My next one will be Alice In Jazzland, his big band recording from the late Sixties, originally remastered for Blue Note International but left in a vault until now. Can you say more about this? It sounds promising indeed.

Alexander: I feel for you, but my experiences in two years of inner city teaching can easily top that. I came in with no experience and was put into classes immediately, instead of having a mentor. Not so good, but I had gotten used to it. Then a few weeks into the year, they pulled me out of my classes, gave them to a sub, so I could watch my "mentor," who was among the most useless teachers in the whole school and was only doing this to get the extra bonus money. So that totally undercut my authority with the kids. After a few more weeks of this, I got my students back, then got into a row with the teacher I shared a room with. She put up problems on the board for the entire day and refused to let me erase the blackboard! After complaining about this, I was transferred to the Special Needs classes. Not one, not two, but five periods of teaching remedial math to 9th grade students who had failed math and english in middle school, and were also felt to be discipline problems. It really was little more than baby sitting. I handed out suspensions frequently but was always seen as a weak teacher they could get over on. Many of the students were waiting to turn 16 to drop out, and I think I lost about five or six to that and two girls got pregnant and left. The second year was marginally better, and I think I reached two of my five classes. One class was horrible with a completely out of control student that I couldn't do anything about (he was related to the school security guard). Oh did I mention the school was considerably mobbed up, with the teachers with the best assignments having ties with the Mob? And a fire drill pulled by the students at least twice, often three or four times a week? And one of my drop-out students from the previous year killed in a shooting, which then started a chain of gang related violence inside the school? And a handful of the very worst teachers either encouraging cheating on the standardized exams or actually selling drugs in the school? Unlike most of my students, I had other options, and I soon exercised them. I did stop by a few years later to see how many of my students graduated, and more did than I would have expected. Now whether that H.S. diploma really means anything is another story.

My experience is that as eBay has "matured," the number of con artists and sleazy operators has increased considerably. I've had a few experiences with the eBay stores where the sellers offer a good price but then it turns out they are selling something not in stock (to be special ordered), and it takes months. I'm about to cancel one of these transactions, which has dragged on forever. (I suppose this is not that different from gemm, where probably 2/3 of the stores listing material I search on is not actually in stock.) I just find the overall eBay experience a lot worse than it was a few years ago, so I pretty much stick with Amazon sellers and zStores.

It's gotten to the point I virtually never check eBay anymore. In part, I've filled in most of the major gaps in my collection, but overall it's gotten to be such a hassle (and rising amounts of fraud) that I don't want to bother. It's just not fun anymore. I currently can't use half.com (can't pay with non-US credit card or Paypal for some ridiculous reason) so only use Amazon or gemm.

Well, I'm still not crazy about the Bad Plus, but I think it is very cool that they have a pretty deep understanding of where jazz came from and where it went it the 1960s and 1970s. The fact that they would tip their fans off to Nessa Records is also cool, though it means anyone on the fence for the AEC box had better move.