Oct 5th: JALC features Sun Ra Arkestra with Marshall Allen

Sun Ra Turns 100: Sun Ra Arkestra with Marshall Allen on Livestream

Stan Getz - Eddie Sauter - Focus

Arnie writes to alert us to a post at Stan Getz Community:

Almost two years ago, Doug Ramsey disclosed with some excitement that videotape existed of portions of a television performance of Focus, the classic collaboration between Stan Getz and the brilliant composer and arranger Eddie Sauter. Doug's Rifftides staff tracked down the clip and posted it - but YouTube removed it almost immediately because whoever posted it seems to have been in violation. The copyright holder took offense.

  

A portion of this classic TV performance has shown up once again. I suggest you watch it (and perhaps record it, if you have the software to do so), before it once again disappears from the internet.

Find more videos like this on Stan Getz Community

Sun Ra Charts | Tone Science

Sun Ra Charts | Tone Science: a very nice collection of over 90 charts from Sun Ra covering 1936-1978. Most were composed by Sun Ra, but there are also charts by Ronald Boykins, Julian Priester, Marshall Allen and others.

For me, part of the fascination with this music is seeing the evolution of Sun Ra’s name. The earliest chart, from December 1936

Allan Chase clarifies the Mystery: "Paper copies of most of these, and some not here, appeared somewhat mysteriously, unsolicited, in two large packages in the mailboxes of some known Sun Ra researchers and aficionados, including me, I believe in the late 1990s. I’m pretty sure it was after the Szwed bio and Robert Campbell discographies were published, and I know it was well after my 1992 MA thesis on Sun Ra’s music. Not sure of the legalities involved! These are mostly sketch scores prepared for copyright documentation; for example, to save fees, he would present groups of discrete compositions as “suites” so several could be copyrighted for one fee. The notes that are there are accurate, as far as I can see — most of the Sun Ra pieces are in his own hand, and he was meticulous — but not all the parts or harmonizations are there, and we know from one video and one CD that he dictated and changed harmony parts in rehearsal, as well as writing them. Some of these are confusing: “Shadow World” doesn’t resemble the recorded versions, to my knowledge — correct me if I’m wrong. “Advice to Medics” seems to include Sun Ra’s own transcription of his improvisation, far more detail than needed for copyright, and it’s a solo Wurlitzer piece (speeded up on record — goes above range of Wurly, as my student Eric Lane noticed.) “Space Loneliness” suite seems to be missing here, and contains many of the great tunes of the time. But there are some tunes here I didn’t have, by others (Richard Evans, for ex.). I could go on…Thanks!

I received my own copy from a wishes-to-be-anonymous source about ten or fifteen years ago, a precious brown-paper wrapped package of deep esoteric wisdom I've been pondering ever since, and likewise studying the evolution in Sun Ra's charts, but also constantly amazed at how complete his conception had been even from the very start of the Arkestra.

And now here they are, at long last, out in the open air.  Let the wild rumpus begin!

Human origins: Are we hybrids?

http://www.macroevolution.net/human-origins.html

in the specific case of humans, if the two assumptions made thus far are correct (i.e., (1) that humans actually are hybrids, and (2) that the chimpanzee actually is one of our two parents), then a list of traits distinguishing human beings from chimpanzees should describe the other parent involved in the cross. And by applying this sort of methodology, I have in fact succeeded in narrowing things down to a particular candidate. Keep reading and I'll explain.

an amusing experiment: at lunch today the boys and I used their electronic 20-questions toy to deduce the extra-hominid source of our human anomalies by answering the toy with those anomalous qualities and letting it guess the animal. It reached the same startling conclusion as this paper.

Official Google Reader Blog: Powering Down Google Reader

Official Google Reader Blog: Powering Down Google Reader? Yikes! So this is it then, the first crack in the ground that signals a new age of computing?  yes there are other readers, but none so elegantly thought out ... or as purpose-directed ... as Google Reader.  It's also perhaps a little frightening to read the part about Google being concerned, for the first time in history, that they are wasting manpower and seeking to consolidate their resources...

Zero budget software suite for filmmakers

Cinephilia & Beyond:

 Now, says DeRose, open-source software like Blender can do almost everything Pixar’s software can do. Last summer, Pixar even open-sourced its subdivision surface code library. “We had a competitive advantage for ten years,” DeRose says, “but now we get more value by letting everyone contribute.”


http://cinephilearchive.tumblr.com/post/44861963720

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All formations are impermanent

What a tremendous mess this is, and with it a cautionary tale for one and all on the stark reality of impermanence in the online world, an impermanence from without.  Here's how it all unfolded:

1. my blog host of choice, Posterous.com was 'acquired' by Twitter in what was called a skills acquisition or some such, implying that it was the employees they wanted, not the product, and sure enough, a short time ago, Posterous announced all my hosted postings there would be cleared out end of April.  fin. 
2. in a quest to find a new home for blog.teledyn.com I did the usual survey and learned that while there are many free host options in 2013, only one provides import tools that will read from the Posterous export xml, Wordpress.  As much as I was nervous of WP after their infamous paid-article spam incident, I thought bygones and clicked them up, and sure enough, the export file imports to WordPress quite effortlessly and appears to be an answer.  I'll elaborate in a moment.
3. WordPress is free, in the sense that they provide a very generous amount of space, allow for a generous amount of hosted images (not sure about pdfs and mp3s but I think those too) however they have an outrageous fee for parking your hostname on your blog; having built up a modest reputation for blog.teledyn.com in the years since I began in 1998, I was wont to lose that juice, but it seemed an imbalance to spend more on the parking of just one hostname than the total cost of both that hostname's registration and  the DNS services to supply it.  Posterous provided this service for free and so I was accustomed to a fleet of blogs for myself and the family, and multiplying these fees across all of those sites?  Well, yes, I'm cheap, but it is also an important part of my self-publishing experiment that I explore what can be done by, as Bucky put it: "to see what a penniless, unknown human individual with a dependent wife and newborn child might be able to do effectively on behalf of all humanity" ... and that means no fees, offered at no charge.
4. Blogger on the other hand, does offer hostname parking for free, and through the google-blog-converters-appengine implies that a blog can be imported from WordPress, and so the strategy emerges: to export Posterous, import into WordPress, export and convert into a Blogger file, import that and voila!

Only the online world, like the rest of tech culture, rarely fully explains its promises.  Hence this current mass of almost.  What happens first is the notion of export does not imply what we normally think of in having materials moved out of one location bound for another.  What a blog 'export' (carefully quined) really means is a transfer of the semantics ... but not necessarily the content.  Text is largely preserved, links to outside material is largely preserved (with a few skips here and there) but other content is only sometimes copied over, and sometimes not.

For the unwary, and for those who may not quite understand how the Internet works, the import to WordPress looks good: because it preserves much of the content as links, and because Posterous.com has not yet (at the time of this writing) shut its doors, many of the postings over at teledyn.wordpress.com do look fine, properly formatted, seemingly intact.  This is an illusion: the posterous hosted content will appear as gaping holes (Posterous full-dump backups do give you your full content, so all that material is not lost, it is just, for the timebeing, homeless)

On the plus side, most of my imagery tended to be 3rd party citings of image and video material, and in that teledyn.wordpress.com does a good job of preserving the illustrated nature of my blog posts; it is just unfortunate that with the loss of the blog.teledyn.com address pointing to that material, I have to start from scratch in building my referral reputation, and a further thorn that as I do so, I am really building the reputation of wordpress, so in a sense, there is a cost here, albeit a mild and invisible one.

And so on to teledyn.blogspot.com as the next candidate home.  It is Google, and so one hopes financially more stable than Posterous, but it is Google so one expects zero technical support, clunky outmoded acquired software (eg Google Sites that still uses pre-xhtml FONT SIZE tags).  So expectations are managed.

On a first try, not fully reading the warnings, I submit the exported WordPress xml to the online hosted converter -- the warnings say my file should be three times too big, and it returns a file twice the allowed size, but I import it anyway.  The import balks at a single posting from 2008 and skips a few comments but otherwise appears to be a success.

On inspection, however, the Blogger import has squashed all YouTube and Google Map embeds into odd looking BB-Forum (?) [T]tags[/T] !?  Now that is an anachronism, and a serious spoiler to a lot of postings.  Instead of being illustrated, my posts now present a puzzle, albeit a puzzle that can be solved, but the eye-candy is now elsewhere.

And there is another feature of that elsewhere -- where even WordPress had fetched and re-hosted image content, with the Blogger import, all images are links now, links back to WordPress! 

Hoping this might have been data conservation by the hosted converter, I downloaded the current revision of the wordpress2blogger python script and run that, resulting in a somewhat larger xml file, and I clear the blog and resubmit this new import -- hundreds of errors pruning hundreds of articles, and many articles duplicated; apparently the hosted script and the downloadable latest revision are not terribly similar.  Once again, I clear the blog and then re-import the earlier broken but at least more or less complete script.

There is a moral: All formations are impermanent - Internet formations perhaps especially so

This body is seen to continue for a year, for two years, five years, ten years, twenty years, fifty years, a hundred years, and even more. But of that which is called mind, is called thought, is called consciousness, one moment arises and ceases as another continually both day and night.  (SN 12.61)

So closes and re-opens another epoch in blog.teledyn.com and for the moment I'm still not entirely sure which is the better venue, to transition to teledyn.wordpress.com and abandon the hostname to WP's, or suffer the outrageous misfortunes of a life hosted by Blogger, but the upshot for you dear reader is this confusing tangle of now triplicated content between here and there and the old there that will linger until April 30th when we'll all start to really appreciate what's been lost.

 “Your body is like a dew-drop on the morning grass, your life is as brief as a flash of lightning. Momentary and vain, it is lost in a moment.” ― Dogen Zenji

The Heart of London

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The London Stone, Cannon Street: For hundreds of years the small limestone block was recognised as the heart of the City of London and became a traditional site to pass laws, reclaim debts, swear oaths and make official proclamations.

WalkLondon adds that the stone may not currently be in its enclave; it was moved out for safe-keeping during the Cannon Street road constructions.

Be Bop Wino: Blow "Mr. Low-Blow" / Lyin' Girl Blues - Red Saunders and his Orchestra (Columbia 30218)

Recorded in Chicago, June 15th, 1950. Personnel: Hot Lips Page, Sonny Cohn (trumpets); Harlan Floyd, John Avant (trombones); Porter Kilbert (alto sax); Leon Washington (tenor sax); McKinley Easton (baritone sax); Earl Washington (piano); Jimmy Richardson (bass); Jumpin' Joe Williams (vocal); Sonny Blount (arranger).

via Be Bop Wino: Blow "Mr. Low-Blow" / Lyin' Girl Blues - Red Saunders and his Orchestra (Columbia 30218).

How Do You Rehearse The Unknown?

Wayne Shorter On Jazz: "The six years I was with Miles, we never talked about music. We never had a rehearsal. Jazz shouldn't have any mandates. Jazz is not supposed to be something that's required to sound like jazz. For me, the word 'jazz' means, 'I dare you.' The effort to break out of something is worth more than getting an A in syncopation."

"This music, it's dealing with the unexpected. No one really knows how to deal with the unexpected. How do you rehearse the unknown?"

language from birdsong: deep roots of human speech

How human language could have evolved from birdsong: Researchers propose new theory on deep roots of human speech: our finite vocabularies can generate a seemingly infinite string of words. Indeed, the researchers suggest that humans first had the ability to sing, as Darwin conjectured, and then managed to integrate specific lexical elements into those songs.

seems first you sing ...
and then you have to say something

Time to dig out the old haunts

The whole Posterous thing probably was too good to be true, and true enough it was. As of April 30, all those Posterous blogs will vanish, and that means it's time to rethink a web writer's web strategy.

Self hosting is far too much heartache and expense, so for then time being it's back to old blogger.com -- not that it is really and more 'permanent' but let's hope there's enough in it to keep Google interested enough to not wipe it out.

Louis Armstrong - Potato Head Blues

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfGZB78R7uw?wmode=transparent]

via youtube.com

"one of the most astonishing accomplishments in all of twentieth century music."

potatoheadblues.pdf

Skid-Dat-De-Dat / Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qo2uhNRJok]

"Skit-Dat-De-Dat is a very good and interesting study of 6-8-10 bar phrases of contrasts with 2 bar fill-ins by pianist, in between, for player to take breath before each new and good attack. This solo starts by long whole notes, with a gradual change to the rhythmical pattersn which delight player and listener."

Skit-Dat-De-Dat_Transcription.pdf

According to Joe Oliver and Kid Ory, the very earliest improvisations were slow evolutions, small changes on each chorus moving progressively farther from the tune both rhythmically and melodically.