Neal Pomea

Nick: Hey! Get me! I'm giving out wings!

Yup. Any Bach heirs here to collect? What a dickhead. You mean the judge, right?

Jane is a peach! Through her brothers she introduced me to a lot of blues and 50s r&b. I introduced her to jazz, old and more modern, Cajun, and country. Together we explored bluegrass, and to this day I think she enjoys it more than I do. I prefer the country music of the 50s and earlier. For a while here in Washington, radio had bluegrass every day. It is now consigned to weekends, supplanted by talk radio. We commiserated about that development, as well as the demise of WDCU radio for jazz. I did more jazz cd collecting and spending 10-15 years ago than I do today, but we tend to like the same things,. The be bop and hard bop is a bit busy for her (strange for a person who likes bluegrass at breakneck speeds!). Maybe busy is not the right word. Emotionally, it doesn't suit her like New Orleans jazz, which can be quite speedy. As for sprawl, well, she's less than happy about that. I am the same way with my cds and records as I am about my books, papers, etc. They are all over the place and even I can't find stuff. She is way more sensible about organization than I am.

Onion Asks, What Do You Think?

I believe I will send a Native American in my place to accept my award, a la Brando.

For library databases: RILM Abstracts of Music Literature ProQuest Dissertations and Theses In Dissertations and Theses, find a dissertation and go to the appendix with the bibliography and see what all is listed there. The writers need to thoroughly survey the literature. Hope that helps.

Eclectic show! When John Fahey died, Tom did a show on him, even interviewed Fahey's friend, Dick Spottswood. I was really surprised! It was a nice tribute.

Interesting point about memory. I understand that when Harry Smith released his Anthology of American Folk Music in the mid-50s, the music on it was considered old-time, almost ancient, even though some of those recordings were no more than about 20 years old at the time. We seem to have lost a lot of memory in a short span in that instance! Now, I am not saying that today Count Basie is considered "old time" the same way Uncle Dave Macon was in the 1950s, but Walter Page's Blue Devils or Bennie Moten's orchestras probably are. Some call it cartoonish music. Fine with me, I love those old cartoons! Hooray Kansas City! On the topic of FM, I hear it every weekend. Here in the DC area we have great shows, many kinds of music! But I mostly hear those shows on a boom box in my kitchen, so I can't help with picking out a tuner.

Did this just come out recently? It's the kind of thing Rob Bamberger would cover on his radio show Hot Jazz Saturday Night on WAMU in Washington DC, but I believe he did a whole show on Oliver this summer (or was that last year, so it's time for another special? ) Thanks for calling it to attention.

Iraq Study Group's exit strategy was simple: eat the damn thing!

Somebody should write a story (whether it happens or not) about Joe Bussard in the audience in a tuxedo among the nominees getting called up for the award and thanking all the little people who made it all possible! Best Boxed Or Special Limited Edition Package * The Cellar Door Sessions 1970 Howard Fritzson, Dan Ichimoto & Seth Rothstein, art directors (Miles Davis) [Columbia/Legacy Recordings] * Fonotone Records Susan Archie & Henry Owings, art directors (Various Artists) [Dust-To-Digital] * A Life Less Lived — The Gothic Box Hugh Brown & Jean Krikorian, art directors (Various Artists) [Rhino Entertainment] * One Kiss Can Lead To Another: Girl Group Sounds Lost & Found Hugh Brown, Sheryl Farber & Maria Villar, art directors (Various Artists) [Rhino Entertainment] * Stadium Arcadium Flea, John Frusciante, Anthony Kiedis, Chad Smith & Matt Taylor, art directors (Red Hot Chili Peppers) [Warner Bros.]

Did anybody vote for the Eminent J.J. Johnson? (I would pick volume 1)

I am not so sure that it is generational. By putting artistic creation in the public, by publishing, it has by definition been put in the public domain. What did you think public domain means? That was the understanding in the U.S. in common sense terms by the generation of the founding fathers. You can look at the foundations of the Enlightenment philosophy if you like. Being made public means being in the public domain. Those were the facts understood by the founding fathers in the U.S. I think too many misconceptions are being read into the concept of the public domain, as though you could have an ownership conflict between Owner Public Domain vs Owner Sweat of His Brow Artist/Publisher/Engineer. It's like a law suit between a fact and a person! Public domain is NOT a right like a private owner's right to their property. It is more like the absence of property rights. It's more like a fact. If anyone asserts that public domain is the public wresting ownership from a private owner, I would disagree on the facts. The private owner is only a private owner by statutory grant, not in fact. An artistic creation is like an action or a word one utters. You cannot make it private once it is out there. And you can only assign property-like rights for so long, in my opinion. That said, now that artists and their families, publishers and their families, and engineers and their families, are economically dependent on this long-wayward trend of copyright protection, what can we do? We cannot cut loose these people. I do not see any reasonable proposals for addressing this. It is not as though special compensation is awarded creators as wards of the state, or like beneficiaries of Medici-like patrons of the arts. Is there a new model forthcoming? I don't see any reason why copyright as currently configured should be the social instrument of providing economically for the creators/performers/publishers/engineers of music etc. Ok, I meant that with a pretty good will. Guess it'll go over like a lead zeppelin.

Any details on this? AMG has no information that I could find.

I gravitate toward "pre-classic" recordings made originally on shellack 78s, the kind heard at Red Hot Jazz Archive.

Lindsay: "So Bob, is that a 'tape deck in your tractor' or are you just glad to see me?" Lord, I apologize for that.

I should get this. I have Misterioso, with the same people and from the same dates, and it's one of my favorite Monk albums.

Actually, there is a movement afoot in the U.S. to find some kind of intellectual property protection -- patent, copyright, something -- not only for recipes but also for food on the plate that you are served in a restaurant. See http://www.foodandwine.com/articles/new-er...-recipe-burglar My take on this is that food on the plate doesn't endure enough to be the subject of copyright. It is by definition consumable, not enduring. Would it be logical to give a term of ownership of 50 years, or maybe 70 years after the death of the chef/creator, to a dish destined for waste in a short time if everything comes out all right? People in other fields are emboldened to lobby for surprising things when they see the model of U.S. copyright.

If I make it 10 more days, I will have lived longer than Bill Evans.

I would rephrase his premise. The public domain concept is more radical, in a sense. Something belonging to no one and to all? Could that be socialist? To me, copyright is conservative. Those strange, powdered-wigged founding fathers, some of whom owned slaves, wanted works to become public domain in 9 years. They were more radical and socialist than the punk rocker who wrote that piece. He wants his piece of property. Can't blame him. In the United States, it was understood that from the time the work is made public, the work is public domain, but the government gave a grant to the creators to have property-like monopoly rights for a limited time. This grant of monopoly property-like rights is not socialist, it is conservative, modeling itself after real property rights. Over the course of time, the copyright law for music has come to cover the published music and lyrics, and the medium or sound recording. Property-like monopoly rights were assigned. Isn't that conservative? (How is that for me being predictable?) Are you in favor of EU's c term extension proposal?

No thanks. It scared me to watch it, and it sure made the audience sick. I don't think I am at all detached from reality, friend. Not at all. Confident that I am not, thank you. I am trying to understand what Richards thought he was doing. If I were out of touch with reality, I would not realize how much his performance hurt people. But I do realize it. Even with a benign interpretation, he should not have done it. He was genuinely mad at the hecklers, and if he was trying to make social commentary about oppression of "gangstas," he is not the one to do it and not under those circumstances. On the Letterman show he seemed shocked and upset that he could call up such anger and hate as emotions in order to give such a performance that looked so realistic, but that doesn't mean he is racist, in my opinion. And on the issue of referencing lynching, it has been before done in comedic ways. In Blazing Saddles, there is a scene where the town is going to lynch the black sheriff (and they use the N word), but he outwits the rubes and racists by kidnapping himself. It was a funny scene, and I don't recall anyone accusing Mel Brooks of racism. Richards' performance was not funny at all because it was too realistic and it sickened the audience. If he wanted to shock, he shocked all right, but to no good end. And I don't put any stock in what Paul Rodriguez or Sinbad were saying about it. We don't even know if they were paying close attention, or if they suspect Richards because of something they know about him backstage. And on top of that, he doesn't have the stature or the voice to be lecturing blacks about whether they are oppressed. Voices like Bill Cosby can't even be heard.

He wasn't saying they should be lynched and he wasn't calling them the N word, either. He was being satirical, saying in effect "Don't act like you are oppressed. You want to know what oppression is? It's what happened 50 years ago when the all white audience would have cried out 'Look, there's a N. N. N. N.' Let's lynch them for interrupting a white man. That's what oppression was." Or something like that. They should apologize for interrupting his act, not sue him for oppressing them. And he shouldn't try to be satirical again because he just pissed off people (if, that is, anybody gives him a chance to perform again.) I don't understand this talk about referencing lynching. He wasn't advocating that they should be lynched, any more than a history book recounting those days advocates it. He was commenting on it, satirizing it. In my opinion.

The YouTube videos of the rant that I find are only 2:47, and the Letterman appearance with the apology didn't make much sense as far as I could see and only confused it all. What? Is this supposed to be some kind of Rorschach Test or something? See whatever you bring into it? Is there more to the rant than the 2:47 video?

This is one of my all time favorite jazz albums. I rate it that highly.

Now everybody tells me there's other ways to get high. They don't seem to understand I'm too far gone to try. Now these lonely memories, they're all I can't lose, And I'm down to seeds and stems again, too.