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Mole

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Everything posted by Mole

  1. So assuming most would be graduating, would they just stay to play sports? Start work on a second high school diploma? I guess in the age of dual enrollment there are ways to manage this, but the educational ramifications seem weird. Admittedly I only read the tweet and haven’t looked into it further because who cares/Kentucky.
  2. To quote Charles Ives, the great American composer: "...beauty in music is too often confused with something that lets the ears lie back in an easy chair. Many sounds that we are used to, do not bother us, and for that reason, we are inclined to call them beautiful...when a new or unfamiliar work is accepted as beautiful on its first hearing, its fundamental quality is one that tends to put the mind to sleep". I admire CPAC and their willingness to challenge our lazy ears in terms of both tonality and temperament. It’s very forward looking stuff.
  3. I’ll preface this with I really don’t care what they play after the game, but regardless of what anyone thinks about the song and it’s history, context, and meaning — that it’s plainly racist, maybe racist, or obviously not racist — those emails and what they represent have to be very discouraging to black students and black student athletes. As someone who is pretty insulted from that garbage in my day-to-day life, it’s discouraging even if it isn’t surprising. There’s real merit to the idea that the song’s history and origins are unclear but it now functions as a unifying force (or at least did) and has shed whatever racist meaning and history it might have once had, but a bunch of old racists sending plainly racist emails about the song kind of hurts that case. Like I get the case for the song not being racist, but these emails are telling me that the racists seem to think otherwise. That doesn’t completely sink the chances of keeping the Eyes, but it sure doesn’t help.
  4. I’d add that there’s an immediacy and intimacy to the great small groups that is magical and worthy of all the romanticizing that they get. Kind of Blue was famously minimally prepared to encourage that kind of immediacy. Watching players compose in real time is magical, even if they’re developing previously developed ideas. But it’s not so much the notes they play but the character they bring to those notes. Students transcribe Miles solos all the time; they copy his sound and approach, but they don’t sound like him because of the character he brought to his playing. People become obsessed with the notes, but it’s the interpretation and style of those notes that move you, just like reading off parts.
  5. Comparing the work of Gil Evans or any other performance of a composition to a reciting the pledge is asinine. If we’re using spoken dialogue analogies, a more apt comparison is watching a performance of Hamlet. The words may always be the same, but the impact, context, and emotional content can vary wildly. The printed page, be it music or text, can only convey so much information. Quality musicians reading from parts are absolutely engaging in the same kind of “conversation” as in improvised music; it’s more of a difference in degree of freedom. When reading music, you have to turn notes into musical ideas within the context of an ensemble all doing the same, like a conversation. Call it a conversation of interpretations. When improvising, you’re generally still confined by the chord changes and whatever substitutions you can imply, but there’s certainly more freedom. It’s still an interpretive conversation, just will fewer constraints. Then there’s the reality that improvisations are often built on preconceived ideas and plans, not unlike a composition. If you listen to enough solos by the same players over the same tune, you’ll hear the same patterns come up and sometimes even whole solos almost entirely get reused. Check out these two performances of Straight, No Chaser by Clark Terry and Bob Brookmeyer. These are two different performances with roughly the same solo by Clark Terry. Then of check this one out with Clark Terry and Wes Montgomery from around the same time period. It’s a little bit different, but it sure does sound familiar, and not just the opening lick. And just because his feel is so good, here’s Monk playing it the same tune.
  6. The statue is serious and isn't satire. Here's an interview with the artist who made the statue:
  7. Interrupting this new-Nazi discussion to do some arts advocacy. Arnold Schoenberg (whose music was labeled “degenerate” by the OG Nazis) wrote an opera entitled Moses und Aron on the Bible story. There are quite a few complete performances of it available on YouTube. One of these performances has a pretty explicit Golden Calf scene. This scene could be easily found with hours of study of the work and watching a few performances. And thus concludes your arts advocacy. Happy hunting!
  8. That golden Trump has to be satirical, right?
  9. They only let you slip away out of kindness, I suppose.
  10. Has it been discussed elsewhere what’s up with the MAGA Gig’em thumbs up thing?
  11. I thought the tongue-in-cheek comment was more apparent than it apparently was. My apologies. One of the great and most inventive musical geniuses of the 20th century collaborating with one of the great and inventive orchestrators of the 20th century is like finding out that Beethoven and Berlioz got together for a couple of symphonies. A lot of it doesn't feel like jazz as we'd usually think of it, but it's something amazing and beautiful.
  12. Your Gil Evans opinion is bad and you should feel bad about it. The range of colors that Gil Evans found on those recordings were amazing. Post 1980s Miles often feels like Miles was more interested in being cool than in making great music. Of course, that time period also gave us this great bit of awkwardness. There's a great moment where Miles interrupts to ask who the organ player is only to discover a teenage Joey DeFrancesco. Joey was touring with Miles a few months later. It happens around 32:30. Christian McBride is on bass too, so it's a pretty great house band.
  13. I friend of mine has very stereotypically Black sounding first name. I knew him by that name for years until he got a fancy corporate gig in the financial sector. Shortly before he got that gig, he started going by his middle name. He made a business decision that being seen as too black wasn't in his interest. It seems to have been a lucrative choice for him. I have to question the decision making capabilities of corporations that would frame these issues in terms of too much whiteness. I understand these discussions going on in academia or the broader public sphere, but a company doing this while trying to sell disgusting drinks seems dumb. I avoid getting offended by proxy about stupid things so I don't really care about the video, but I wonder what the future holds for LinkedIn and Coke. This thing won't hurt them all that much, but the fact that this happened isn't a positive sign of their keen business acumen.
  14. Any station that plays Toot Suite regularly is alright by me. Pre-pandemic, their Saturday programming was always a good, fun listen. It doesn’t really translate to the remote world. Weekday NPR is incessant in its NPRness and that can be a beating after a while. Some issues are race issues; some are poverty issues; some are both. Healthcare and the pandemic might be both. On the other hand, portraying these issues as purely Black issues creates a space where the majority population can pretend that it isn’t their problem.
  15. A nationwide boycott of Coke seems like a really good public heath initiative.
  16. I'm not sure if this fits, because it sounds like every song at once, but John Oswald:
  17. Can’t forget Harry Partch. He certainly fits this thread. The documentaries about his music might be more interesting than his music. He made his own instruments dividing the octave into 43 unequally tempered notes and acted as his own publishing company, mailing out records to fans. It’s hard listening, like the music the lizard people might make, but it’s worth a little time.
  18. Written one year prior to the Rite of Spring. I’ll direct your attention to about 1:55 in particular. I’m not saying that Stravinsky stole that lick, but it’s the same thing. This will be my last Ives post, but for most of the interesting developments in the first half of the 20th century, Ives probably did it first. And how about some prepared piano? There were some precedents for the technique, but not much for what John Cage did.
  19. Ives singing his "They Are They!" is a fun time. And how about Daniel Johnston for the Texas connection?
  20. Ives did most of the things Stravinsky did before Stravinsky: Ornette Coleman's playing around 1:10 always gets me and is sort of a proof of concept of the expressive capabilities of free jazz: There were some pretty hip things happening in the late 14th century. Like things that seem 700+ years too early: Whatever you think of Schoenberg, every composer for a generation either had to copy him or intentionally not copy him. The Nazis labeled it degenerate music, which tells me that he was doing something pretty compelling:
  21. That Miles picture tells so much of jazz history in a single look.
  22. In this conspiracy (?) world, what should google return instead of whatever it returned? Basically, if this is amazing, what would be the non-amazing result? Also, since this seems to be the appropriate place, why is it so hard to get to various league standings on ESPN.com on a computer? It’s easy on my phone, but the computer version of the website is so hard to navigate. I’ll be back with more questions as things float through my brain. This thread is a real service to our community.
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