Claude

Rubbish!

Jazz Musicians Lose Control Defining intelligence is highly problematic. Was Einstein smarter than Mozart? Are either smarter than Shakespeare? What about Gandhi and Buddha? Intelligence is a broad and complex entity—and nearly impossible for neuroscientists to study. We do know that there’s an area in the very front of the brain—the prefrontal cortex (PFC)—that’s important for the qualities most people associate with intelligence. The PFC is important for logic, rational thought, abstract thinking, concentration, planning, and impulse control—the latter colorfully demonstrated when a three-foot iron pole blasted through a man’s forehead in 1848, sparing his life but leaving him rude and irritable. But as important as the PFC is for intelligent human behavior, there may be one process that doesn’t really need it—creativity. Charles Limb and Allen Braun from the National Institutes on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine the brains of jazz musicians while the latter improvised and played memorized pieces. Their results, published in the February 27 issue of PLoS ONE, suggest that during improvisation, the musicians essentially shut down a large portion of the PFC. Getting a musician to play the piano inside an fMRI machine is not an easy task. The musicians had to lie on their backs with their heads and torsos inside the machine, resting a plastic keyboard on their knees. The researches then placed a mirror over their eyes and gave them headphones so they could see and hear what they were playing. The musicians played both improvised songs and memorized songs while in the scanner, and the resulting fMRI scans recorded the amount of change in neural activity—increases and decreases—between the two versions. The researchers found that much of the change between improvisation and memorization occurred in the PFC, the region of the frontal lobe of the brain that helps us think and problem-solve and that provides a sense of self. Interestingly, the large portion responsible for monitoring one’s performance (dorsolateral prefrontal cortex) shuts down completely during improvisation, while the much smaller, centrally located region at the foremost part of the brain (medial prefrontal cortex) increases in activity. The medial prefrontal cortex is involved in self-initiated thoughts and behaviors, and is very active when a person describes an event that has happened to him or makes up a story. It makes sense—in order to unleash their creativity, artists need to stop thinking about what they’re doing and just “feel the music.” Perhaps that’s what’s keeping the rest of us robots out of Carnegie Hall—we just think too much. We follow rationality and logic and try to achieve goals. As anyone who’s read an artist’s biography is well aware, creative geniuses are bad at articulating what inspires them—at least in a way that the rest of us can relate to and try to attain. Those who receive and act out such genius must, accordingly, shut down any capacity for premeditation or over-analysis—it is, perhaps, the fundamental nature of their gift. And their vastly superior auditory acuity and coordination probably don’t hurt. http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/discoblo...s-lose-control/ Neural Substrates of Spontaneous Musical Performance: An fMRI Study of Jazz Improvisation : http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%...al.pone.0001679

Thanks for the update, Daniel. Does anyone know which mastering the Y1100 "OJC's" will have? Budget reissues of K2 masterings?

Those multichannel mixes from stereo (or even mono) material are computer-generated. They usually put some artificial reverb on the rear channels and create a center and subwoofer signal from the stereo sound. Just ignore the multichannel layer and play the stereo layer. There's a post on this SACD on the Steve Hoffman forum: http://www.stevehoffman.tv/forums/showthread.php?t=96249

Here's the tribute website that is mentionned in the Al-Jazeera report: http://iheardyoumalachi.org

"Leaving West" was reissued on a Turrentine "Best of" CD http://www.answers.com/topic/the-best-of-s...t=entertainment Here's a previous thread on this album and other CTI stuff: http://www.organissimo.org/forum/index.php?showtopic=25687

I think the label was revived in 1987, with the first CD reissues and then new productions ("Michael Brecker" being the first) http://www.jazzdisco.org/impulse/1973-dis/c/

For what it is worth ... (wikipedia) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wes_Montgomery

It very soon stopped being a format war when PC DVD burners accepted both formats. So there is no compatibility problem. I don't know if there are still DVD recorders which are limited to one format. DVD-R and DVD+R blanks are both sold very successfully. While the technology is different, the user doesn't need to think about this, except for some more advanced usages.

HD-ready displays are like good hifi systems. They reveal the quality of the disc. Poor DVDs will look like shit and good DVDs will look great, even if they don't come near the quality of HD material. DVD quality is good enough to be enjoyed on HD screens. It's mainly standard definition TV signals that show their limitation. Since I bought a 46" Full-HD Sony LCD a year ago, I've been buying and watching more DVDs than before. Only those that have a lower resolution due to non-anamorphic transfer are disappointing in quality. I don't plan to buy a Bluray player soon, because there are currently less than 20 movies on Bluray I would want to buy. I hope that now that the format war is over, more non-mainstream movies will be released in HD. It would be great if Criterion would do Bluray discs.

Seems that this is not so rare. In Luxembourg, there recently was a lawsuit between a bank and a customer. The customer had noticed, while withdrawing money at the cash dispenser, that there was way too much money on his account. So he decided to withdraw as much as possible, thinking the bank would not notice the error. Of course they did and they reclaimed the money, but the customer had already spent most of it.

A parliament cannot prevent the government from proposing a law, but it can vote against the law. Of course it was a signal against the proposal to extend copyright when the parliament did not want to include the extension as a proposed measure in it's report, but these are two different procedures (general policy report/copyright law). The legislative procedure is only starting now. Another thing to know is that the directive extending copyright would have to be adopted in the "codecision" procedure, in which it needs to be approved by both the parliament and the Council. If the two institutions disagree, a compromise needs to be found. Maybe that's why McCreevy proposes 95 years, so that in the end the duration will be 70 years

So far, I received about ten of them at <$10/CD from three different asian sellers, and they all look like legit pressings from this VICJ-41xxx series (K2 remasters released in 2006, priced 1800 Yen). There is no sign that they could be counterfeits. Here are two of the sellers: http://search.ebay.com/_W0QQsassZhelix1952 http://stores.ebay.com/SuperCheapCD

Sorry to bump this old news thread, but many of those K2 remasters are currently showing up on Ebay (search for "VICJ" in the description) from various asian sellers at low prices ($8-11). Most of them have not been released in the US K2 series. I like their sound (compared to the regular OJCs) and the packaging.

I see what you mean. On January 22, there has been a vote by the European Parliament on a report on the "Cultural Industries in Europe", for which some members proposed to include the wish for copyright extension. These amendements were voted down. It was just a report. The EU Parliament has no right of legislative initiative. http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080...-shot-down.html

What vote do you mean? The EU proposal is brand new (there is only the press release, the text itself has not yet been made public) and will have to pass the Commission first, and then will have to go through the EU institutions, where the discussions will take at least a year.

Obviously, this proposal had to come some day, as some big pop/rock hits from the 60's would enter the public domain during the next decade, and the industry is pressuring to have copyright extended. The "use it lose it" provision seems to be more of a manoeuvre to present it as a balanced proposal. To enter into force, this proposal would have to be adopted by the EU Commission first (a formality), then have to be approved by the EU parliament and the EU Council (the national governements). Here's the Commission press release: http://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction...;guiLanguage=en And some press comments: EU commissioner backs record biz on copyright extensions (The Register) Copyright extension will benefit few (Financial Times) EU Commission wants 95 year copyright on recordings (IP Kat)

Now finally to be released on DVD: http://truebluemusic.com/prodinfo.asp?number=VAR-50D

For jazz and pop CDs and data-DVDs (with music files) I use the Whereisit software, which is the best universal disc manager that I know. http://www.whereisit-soft.com It includes plugins for freeDB, imdb etc, so little data needs to be entered by the user. Unfortunately, freeDB is almost unusable when it comes to classical music, as ther are no seperate Composer and ARTist fields, so scanning all your classical CD will result in a Khachaturian CD being listed next to Karajan's Beethoven symphonies, and so on. At least as far SACDs go, I have my classical collection online, thanks to this great site: http://www.sa-cd.net/library/725

The Kocsis box does not offer the complete Debussy piano music. The Etudes are missing. It also includes the Ravel piano concertos. http://www.iclassics.com/productDetail?contentId=64511

Salut Michel, For the past year, I've ordered most full price CDs (many classical SACDs) at Caiman, on the Amazon.fr Marketplace. A lot of discs costing 20€ on Amazon.fr (free shipping to Belgium) are available for 9-12€ + 3.4€ shipping per disc. The CDs are shipped individually from the US, so there is no problem with customs, as the value is below 22€ per shipping. It takes 2-3 weeks for the CDs to arrive. Orders can be cancelled. Caiman prices go up and down constantly every day, sometimes just a few cents, sometimes a few euros. Put the discs in your Amazon shopping basket and you'll get a price change notification every time you check back, and you'll be able to order the discs when the price is low. Two disadvanteges: - Your credit card will be billed immediately, even if the item is shipped much later. If you cancel the order, it takes quite some time before the refund is credited. - Don't try to order CDs that are OOP and hard to find, because Caiman seems to have few items in stock. For mid price reissues, I usually buy them from jpc.de, amazon.de or CD Universe.

Since I started this thread I have bough a lot of Speaker's Corner LPs (about 20), and they sound mostly excellent compared to the CD versions (remastered Impulse! or Verve reissues), except Charles Mingus "Black Saint and the sinner lady" and Chet Baker "Chet is Back" (on the Pure Pleasure label distributed by Speakers Corner), which sound better on CD. The most spectacular improvement is Max Roach's "We insist" (Pure Pleasure label), for which the master tape or a good copy was used, whereas the late 80's Candid CD was dubbed from a noisy LP.

I remember that. It was called the "glycol wine" scandal. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine_fraud

I've moderated a few forums in the past 10 years, but those were forums with alot more users, among them undisciplined teenagers and spammers. What does the moderation activity consist of in this forum? Organissimo seems like a very liberal community of mostly adult and reasonable participants,with only a few crazy people enjoying Narrenfreiheit.