May 23rd, 2008
Booker T. Jones interview in Down Beat
The June 2008 issue of Down Beat magazine includes a backstage interview I did with Booker T. Jones, stalwart of the Stax record label and leader of the classic soul band Booker T & The MGs. It’s brief, but Jones has some interesting comments on the challenges and opportunities of the digital age. This issue of Down Beat is available at your local magazine shop now (Freddie Hubbard on the cover).
Friday Video Party: May 23, 2008
Here are three very entertaining videos to get your holiday weekend started right…
Louis Armstrong & Danny Kaye!
Reg Kehoe & His Marimba Queens!
And for you hockey fans…
The Red Wings Guys and Barack Obama!
“No Cover, No Minimum” - May 23, 2008
Here’s the playlist from today’s installment of “No Cover, No Minimum”. It was a fun show today, all over the map, with plenty of long tracks. Too bad nobody was listening—the web stream numbers were way below normal and I only managed to give away one pair of the fabulous Yoshi’s tickets I had on hand. Anyway, here’s what you missed…
HOUR 1 (0600 - 0700)
Adam Rudolph’s Moving Pictures - “Cousin Of The Moon” - Dream Garden (Justin Time)
Radio I Ching - “Gala 2000” - The Fire Keeps Burning (self-released)
Markus James - “Weather Vane” - Snakeskin Violin (Firenze)
Elliott Sharp’s Terraplane - “Katrina Blues/How The Crescent City Got Bleached” - Forgery (Intuition)
Felicia Carter - “S.O.S. Blues” - Feather / Step Lightly (Alberta)
Al Basile - “While We’re Dancing” - The Tinge (Sweetspot)
Aquiles Baez - “Asi Dice Mi Negro” - La Patilla (Cacao Musica)
Corbett/Chrisman/Tice - “Better Life” - Corbett//Chrisman//Tice (Patuxent)
Diabate/Khan/Krisnan - “Birds First Flight” - Strings Tradition (Felmay)
HOUR 2 (0700 - 0800)
John Zorn & Bar Kokhba - “Sother” - Lucifer: Book Of Angels, Vol. 10 (Tzadik)
Avery Sharpe - “Morning” - Legends & Mentors - (JKNM)
Charles Lloyd Quartet - “Migration Of Spirit” - Rabo De Nube (ECM)
Moutin Reunion Quartet - “Kuki’s Dance” - Sharp Turns (Blujazz)
Chicha Libre - “Popcorn Andino” - Sonido Amazonico (Barbes)
Mostly Other People Do The Killing - “The Hop Bottom Hop” - Shamokin!!! (Hot Cup)
Rob Brown Ensemble - “Clearly Speaking” - Crown Trunk Root Funk (AUM Fidelity)
Tango Negro Trio - “Murga Del Atardeces” - La Vuelta Del Malon (Felmay)
HOUR 3 (0800 - 0900)
Negroni’s Trio - “50 Years” - Father & Son (Cacao Musica)
Grupa Janke Randalu - “Confidance” - Live (Jazz’n’arts)
Nik Bartsch’s Ronin - “Modul 46” - Holon (ECM)
Jane Ira Bloom - “Electrochemistry” - Mental Weather (Outline)
Virginia Mayhew Septet - “Just A Blues” - A Simple Thank You (Renma)
The Bo-Keys - “Deuce And A Quarter” - It’s All Connected [label sampler] (Yellow Dog)
Denise LaSalle - “Mississippi Woman” - Pay Before You Pump (Ecko)
The Mannish Boys - “Low Down Feelin’” - Lowdownfeelin’ (Delta Groove)
Smokin’ Joe Kubek & Bnois King - “Freezer Burn” - Blood Brothers (Alligator)
Michael Burks - “Changed Man” - Iron Man (Alligator)
Blind Boys Of Alabama - “Free at Last” - Down In New Orleans (Time/Life)
May 22nd, 2008
Piano Ends Here?
I had not heard of the forthcoming Sony Masterworks CD Art Tatum - Piano Starts Here (Live at the Shrine) until Marc Myers wrote about it yesterday on his excellent JazzWax blog.
Apparently what’s happened is that the techno-whizzes have taken a scratchy, poor-quality recording of piano genius Art Tatum, recorded live at Los Angeles’ Shrine Auditorium in 1949. Then using some cutting-edge enhancement software, they have extracted vast amounts of data from the recording, fed that into a Yamaha Disklavier piano (essentially a high-tech player piano with a hard drive), and recreated the concert. The results will be issued as Piano Starts Here in a couple of weeks.
I have not heard the CD, obviously, so I’ll leave any comment on what it sounds like to Myers. But I will say this: I’m offended. Not so much by what the engineers have done—it sounds like a valuable experiment—as by the fact that Sony has the audacity to sell this as “Art Tatum” and “Live at the Shrine”. It is neither. It seems to me that this is like placing a high-definition digital photograph of a Vermeer painting on view at a museum. People might want to go see that; it would be interesting to see details previously invisible to the naked eye. But it’s not a Vermeer, it’s just an image of one. And if the owner of the photograph sold it at auction as a real Vermeer, he’d be locked up for fraud.
Of course, a CD entitled Piano Starts Here: A Computer Re-Creation of Art Tatum Live at the Shrine probably wouldn’t sell as well.
May 19th, 2008
Herding Cats vs. Holding Kittens
Today, I spent almost ten hours performing a rather silly task. I re-architected a wiki. I can already hear the geeks among you giggling. Wikis don’t have architecture, of course. They’re completely flat with no directories, no hierarchy… just a bunch of pages all mashed up in one big stew pot and crosslinked to hell. They’re organic and ever-changing—anybody can go in at any time and add a bit here, revise a bit there, make a new page… that’s the whole point. Re-architecting a wiki, therefore, is like herding the proverbial cats. It’s almost an oxymoron.
And I felt like a moron doing it. But I promised I would. Actually, I promised I would deliver it weeks ago, and by this morning my boss was almost out of patience. So I hunkered down and spent the entire day trying to impose a hierarchy on a couple hundred half-baked, frequently contradictory, often obsolete and always poorly organized pages of text. Building a castle out of Jell-O, if you will. Granted, that wiki was a mess, and if the plan I came up with is successfully implemented, it won’t be a mess anymore. So I suppose there was value… unless it becomes a mess again, and it will. Entropy, thy name is wiki. Meanwhile, I didn’t listen to a single note of music today. I didn’t write, I didn’t walk, I didn’t do anything even remotely enjoyable until I got home at about 8:00. I just wikied my iki off.
On the other hand, this is what my wife did today: she cuddled kittens. Seventeen itty bitty purring mewing cute as anything kittens. Messy, sure, but c’mon… KITTENS!!! Man, life is so unfair. I think I’m going to make a demand at work tomorrow: I want kittens in my cube! Live ones, mind you, not those drippy motivational posters. No kittens, no work! Give me purring or give me death! Dogs are fine too… Puppies for productivity! No labor without labs! Atta-boy! Atta-boy! Let’s start a revolution! Who’s with me?
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