mjzee

Led Zeppelin scored a major win on Monday in the copyright battle over “Stairway to Heaven,” as the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a jury verdict finding the song did not infringe on the 1968 song “Taurus.” https://nypost.com/2020/03/09/led-zeppelin-wins-stairway-to-heaven-copyright-case/

I'd jump on "Blues For The Fisherman" if you have any interest in Art Pepper: https://store.cdbaby.com/cd/artpepper13 This one caused a stir a few years ago: Walter Namuth Quintet: Left Bank '66 (Featuring Mickey Fields): https://store.cdbaby.com/cd/walternamuthquintetfeatm Their site's layout is terrible. You can't even get an alphabetical list of all jazz artists.

The problem with Record Store Day is there's no guaranteed way to buy what you want. Your local record dealer might not have ordered the titles you want, or been able to get them, or might have only gotten one or two...it's a system designed to benefit insiders.

Not only a great pianist, but his personal sound and technique became the preeminent piano comping sound in jazz, displacing Bud Powell's. I remember seeing Pat Martino around 2006, and whoever he had as a pianist played nothing but Tyner's dense block, swirling chords. RIP.

I use it when I'm playing pool with a friend, and the pool hall is blasting some truly awful hip-hop thing (or whatever they call it these days). I find it amusing that these snippets of awfulness, with their sludgy beats, booming bass, and lack of tunefulness actually have song names and artists, especially since they mostly sound the same.

This looks like an interesting release for Record Store Day: https://recordstoreday.com/SpecialRelease/12081

Thanks, Shrdlu. The pic was used on the back of the RVG release of Volume II, but cropped to just above Sonny's head and to the left of the speaker.

This album is GREAT! Could've been released on Prestige in 1969. Adam Nussbaum, Brian Charette, Ed Cherry...pure pleasure.

Great news! They do amazing things these days.

Good wishes to your wife, and may she have a quick recovery.

So sorry to hear of your loss. Their birthdays were so close! And the way they passed so close together, they must have truly loved each other.

I thought the interviewer was too combative and challenging. I enjoyed spending time with Sonny, even if it was just through print. Question about the picture posted from the Volume II session. Sonny's sitting, to the right there's a speaker, and on top of that there's a case showing a horn. Is that J.J.'s trombone? There was no trumpet on the date.

What do you like about this turntable? It is beautiful.

Thanks. I already do this. I am considering the kit, although I'm not adept at this sort of thing (all thumbs), and for steps 3 & 4 there are no pictures.

Generally, no; I notice it more towards the end of the side. Of course, there are better pressings and worse pressings. 1.75, which is the recommended force from the Pro-Ject manual (the cartridge came with the turntable). It seems high to me, but whatever. No, which is why I wonder whether the belt has something to do with it. I will say that it seems that ECMs show very little rumble.

Correct, only on the record. Actually, mostly notable at the leadout groove, and sometimes in the space between the next-to-last song and the last song (i.e., towards the inside of the record). So while this was my first audiophile turntable (albeit at the low end of the audiophile scale), I do wonder whether this experience is truly superior to a good standard consumer turntable from Sony, Panasonic, or the like. I don't recall encountering this sort of rumble from one of those. Does a low-end audiophile turntable truly "sound" better?

This really looks great, and just might address my needs. Thanks, bresna and Brad! I recently replaced the belt, and that helped for a little while, but the intermittent rumble has returned. I've been playing a lot of my old 45's recently, and moving the belt from the 45 position to the 33 might have exacerbated it. I know they make a box to switch speeds electronically, but thought it was more for convenience; now I wonder.

From an interview with Robbie Robertson in today's NY Post (https://nypost.com/2020/02/19/the-bands-robbie-robertson-on-his-adventures-with-dylan-dali-warhol-and-scorsese/): As a founding member of The Band — which recorded classics such as “The Weight” and “Stage Fright” — the guitar player and songwriter born Jaime Royal Robertson, now qualifies as rock royalty. But some 60 years ago, when he was just a teenage guitar prodigy in the hot rockabilly group Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks, Robertson, now 76, simply wanted to get his due on a songwriting credit and attendant royalties. To that end, Hawkins brought him up to see Morris Levy — a record-label boss with a habit of adding his name to songs his label put out, whether he contributed to the music or not. Remembering that Levy was flanked by “rough-looking guys in black mohair suits,” Robertson tells The Post, “Morris looks at me, looks at Ronnie and says in a gravely voice, ‘He’s a good-looking kid. If you ever have to do time, it’d be good to have him with you.’ I was, like, ‘Holy s–t!’ I figured that I would forego this problem with the songwriting thing.”

Great ideas; thanks!

Is "Wax Time" really in partnership with Amazon???

My Pro-ject Carbon seems to have a little audible rumble. Is there anything I can do about that, or does it need to be serviced? Also, any thoughts on other turntables? The Pro-ject is the first "audiophile" turntable I've owned, but perhaps a more commercial brand (Panasonic, Sony, Audio Technica, etc.) might actually do a better job?

I went for: Ted Brown with Jimmy Raney - Good Company, Clifford Jordan and Junior Cook - Two Tenor Winner, One For All - Live At Smoke, Reeds & Deeds - Cookin', and Grant Stewart - Downtown Sounds.

I just finished reading "This Is Your Brain On Music: The Science Of A Human Obsession," by Daniel J. Levitin. (Good book, btw.) In it, I found a discussion about Joni Mitchell and Jaco that I found fascinating: Joni Mitchell had sung in choirs in public school, but had never taken guitar lessons or any other kind of music lessons. Her music has a unique quality that has been variously described as avant-garde, ethereal, and as bridging classical, folk, jazz, and rock. Joni uses a lot of alternate tunings; that is, instead of tuning the guitar in the customary way, she tunes the strings to pitches of her own choosing. This doesn’t mean that she plays notes that other people don’t—there are still only twelve notes in a chromatic scale—but it does mean that she can easily reach with her fingers combinations of notes that other guitarists can’t reach (regardless of the size of their hands). An even more important difference involves the way the guitar makes sound. Each of the six strings of the guitar is tuned to a particular pitch. When a guitarist wants a different one, of course, she presses one or more strings down against the neck; this makes the string shorter, which causes it to vibrate more rapidly, making a tone with a higher pitch. A string that is pressed on (“fretted”) has a different sound from one that isn’t, due to a slight deadening of the string caused by the finger; the unfretted or “open” strings have a clearer, more ringing quality, and they will keep on sounding for a longer time than the ones that are fretted. When two or more of these open strings are allowed to ring together, a unique timbre emerges. By retuning, Joni changed the configuration of which notes are played when a string is open, so that we hear notes ringing that don’t usually ring on the guitar, and in combinations we don’t usually hear. You can hear it on her songs “Chelsea Morning” and “Refuge of the Roads” for example. But there is something more to it than that—lots of guitarists use their own tunings, such as David Crosby, Ry Cooder, Leo Kottke, and Jimmy Page. One night, when I was having dinner with Joni in Los Angeles, she started talking about bass players that she had worked with. She has worked with some of the very best of our generation: Jaco Pastorius, Max Bennett, Larry Klein, and she wrote an entire album with Charles Mingus. Joni will talk compellingly and passionately about alternate tunings for hours, comparing them to the different colors that van Gogh used in his paintings. While we were waiting for the main course, she went off on a story about how Jaco Pastorius was always arguing with her, challenging her, and generally creating mayhem backstage before they would go on. For example when the first Roland Jazz Chorus amplifier was hand-delivered by the Roland Company to Joni to use at a performance, Jaco picked it up, and moved it over to his comer of the stage. “It’s mine,” he growled. When Joni approached him, he gave her a fierce look. And that was that. We were well into twenty minutes of bass-player stories. Because I was a huge fan of Jaco when he played with Weather Report, I interrupted and asked what it was like musically to play with him. She said that he was different from any other bass player she had every played with; that he was the only bass player up to that time that she felt really understood what she was trying to do. That’s why she put up with his aggressive behaviors. “When I first started out,” she said, “the record company wanted to give me a producer, someone who had experience churning out hit records. But [David] Crosby said, ‘Don’t let them—a producer will ruin you. Let’s tell them that I’ll produce it for you; they’ll trust me.’ So basically, Crosby put his name as producer to keep the record company out of my way so that I could make the music the way that I wanted to. “But then the musicians came in and they all had ideas about how they wanted to play. On my record! The worst were the bass players because they always wanted to know what the root of the chord was." The “root” of a chord, in music theory, is the note for which the chord is named and around which it is based. A “C major” chord has the note C as its root, for example, and an “E-flat minor” chord has the note E-flat as its root. It is that simple. But the chords Joni plays, as a consequence of her unique composition and guitar-playing styles, aren’t typical chords: Joni throws notes together in such a way that the chords can’t be easily labeled. “The bass players wanted to know the root because that’s what they’ve been taught to play. But I said, ‘Just play something that sounds good, don’t worry about what the root is.’ And they said, ‘We can’t do that—we have to play the root or it won’t sound right.’ ” Because Joni hadn’t had music theory and didn’t know how to read music, she couldn’t tell them the root. She had to tell them what notes she was playing on the guitar, one by one, and they had to figure it out for themselves, painstakingly, one chord at a time. But here is where psychoacoustics and music theory collide in an explosive conflagration: The standard chords that most composers use—C major, E-flat minor, D7, and so on—are unambiguous. No competent musician would need to ask what the root of a chord like those is; it is obvious, and there is only one possibility. Joni’s genius is that she creates chords that are ambiguous, chords that could have two or more different roots. When there is no bass playing along with her guitar (as in “Chelsea Morning” or “Sweet Bird”), the listener is left in a state of expansive aesthetic possibilities. Because each chord could be interpreted in two or more different ways, any prediction or expectation that a listener has about what comes next is less grounded in certainty than with traditional chords. And when Joni strings together several of these ambiguous chords, the harmonic complexity greatly increases; each chord sequence can be interpreted in dozens of different ways, depending on how each of its constituents is heard. Since we hold in immediate memory what we’ve just heard and integrate it with the stream of new music arriving at our ears and brains, attentive listeners to Joni’s music—even nonmusicians—can write and rewrite in their minds a multitude of musical interpretations as the piece unfolds; and each new listening brings a new set of contexts, expectations, and interpretations. In this sense, Joni’s music is as close to impressionist visual art as anything I’ve heard. As soon as a bass player plays a note, he fixes one particular musical interpretation, thus ruining the delicate ambiguity the composer has so artfully constructed. All of the bass players Joni worked with before Jaco insisted on playing roots, or what they perceived to be roots. The brilliance of Jaco, Joni said, is that he instinctively knew to wander around the possibility space, reinforcing the different chord interpretations with equal emphasis, sublimely holding the ambiguity in a delicate, suspended balance. Jaco allowed Joni to have bass guitar on her songs without destroying one of their most expansive qualities. This, then, we figured out at dinner that night, was one of the secrets of why Joni’s music sounds unlike anyone else’s—its harmonic complexity bom out of her strict insistence that the music not be anchored to a single harmonic interpretation. Add in her compelling, phonogenic voice, and we become immersed in an auditory world, a soundscape unlike any other.

Surprised that audiophiles haven't yet addressed the weakest link in the chain: the air. After all, music has to travel through the air to reach your ears, and there can be all sorts of qualities in the air in your home that could degrade the signal and give you a sub-optimal listening experience. What you need is a hermetically-sealed listening room with audiophile-quality air pumped in and constantly monitored to insure peak transparency. You don't want air that's too excitable, nor air that's too flat; humidity, ozone, ions, particulates and air pressure are all factors to consider. Someone should start working on this.

About a year ago, I bought Pro-Ject Damp it High-End Damping Feet to put underneath my turntable. I could still hear the effect of a washing machine's spin cycle down the hall; I was recording an LP to CD and could see the rumble on the VU meters. Recorded again with the washer off and the rumble was gone.