Music, books, good works, and other reasons for living.
On occassion, the Rifftides staff posts Compatible Quotes. Earlier this week they paired a Bill Evans quote with this one from Igor Stravinsky
Music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all. Music expresses itself.
To which I add this line from Aldous Huxley:
After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
Well it’s been nearly two weeks and the house still in chaos due to the kitchen and family room renovation, but I can see some progress. The cabinets are getting new sliding shelves and drawers, the backerboard has been affixed to the kitchen floor and is awaiting tiles, and the tiles for the kitchen counter are being placed at this very moment. Still boxed in the garage is the new kitchen sink in a creamy off-white color they call “bisquit,” the “brushed bronze” faucet, and the bisquit colored dishwasher. (Here’s hoping the Sears Kenmore and Kohler versions of “biscuit” match.) Stay tuned. I think progress from here on in will be rapid (at least I hope so).
Would that I could be in Boston to see the Syncopated Rhythms , a music and danced themed exhibit of 20th Century African American Art from the George and Joyce Wein Collection. The Weins shared a lifelong passion for all of the arts and it’s sad that Joyce did not live to see this exhibit open at the Boston University Art Gallery. (Joyce died this past August.) If perchance you find yourself in Boston between November 18 2005 – January 22, 2006 I hope you’ll make time to enjoy this collection of paintings, sculpture, drawings and a painted story quilt.
In the case of good books, the point is not how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you. —Mortimer J. Adler, philosopher, educator and author (1902-2001)
In light of my recent post regarding timely responses to email, I thought I’d share this report from The Center for Media Research.
According to a newly-released IDC study, the worldwide enterprise instant messaging applications market jumped 37% in terms of year-over-year revenue in 2004, and the value, necessity, and use of IM applications for business use is expected to grow from $315 million in 2005 to $736 million in 2009.
Robert P. Mahowald, program director for IDC, said “With more than 28 million business users worldwide… sending nearly 1 billion messages each day in 2005, and many more crossover corporate consumers who use consumer instant messaging networks in the workplace, these products are clearly reaching more mainstream users. Especially in compliance-driven sectors like Wall Street, financial services, and government, instant messaging is a critical differentiator… IDC expects instant messaging – once the plaything of teenagers – to continue to grow into its role as a substantial business collaboration application.”
(c) 2005 MediaPost Communications, 1140 Broadway, 4th Floor, New York, NY 10001
I wonder if one of the reasons that businesses are embracing Instant Messaging is as a means for circumventing the mountains of emails that are sitting in our emailboxes. As we moved from snailmail to fax to email, for the most part we abandoned the prior method rather than using the each newer faster delivery vehicle only as needed. Now that we are being overwhelmed by a larger and larger volume of email at work, I suspect that Instant Messaging is being adopted as the latest means of prioritizing urgent messages. Given time, when we get buried underneath a mountain of IMs, someone will have to come up with something else.
And remember when we didn’t have answering machines? If your call went unanswered, you had to call back later. Now my voice mailbox is full of messages from people who choose to call at their convenience rather than during my business hours and I have to figure out how to return all the messages in a timely fashion. Convenience is great, but I can place only a limited number of calls in a day. And call waiting? I love the fact that I don’t have to worry about missing an emergency call, but as common as it has become, some people still don’t like being put on hold so that you can talk to someone else.
What is your preferred method of communication? When was the last time you wrote a letter and handed it to a mail carrier?
DevraDoWrite devotees know that writer Walt Harrington is one of my gods (if you did not know that go here and here and here and here). I recently learned that his new anthology, The Beholder’s Eye: A Collection of America’s Finest Personal Journalism, is now available from Grove Press. With this collection Walt celebrates what he calls the “oft-belittled personal journalism form.†Amazon’s Book Description portrays the collection’s contributors as “reporters who were willing to reveal themselves in order to bring readers insights that were deeper than supposedly objective third-person stories.†This is the type of writing to which I aspire.
This is a must read…and so grows my reading list.
I recently posted a link to a young German guitarist and commented that I found his audio clips “intriguing.” A reader has written to ask:
What does that mean, please? What is intriguing about them? Is that a positive or negative stance?
It’s not only a valid question, but one that I myself would be likely to ask. In fact, back in July I took Don Heckman to task for the same ambiguity. Here’s an excerpt (you can read the whole thing here):
He describes Lesa Terry’s solos as “briskly swinging, jazz-driven†and mentions Cheryl Keyes “inventive flute soloing and dark-toned vocal,†but does that mean they were good? Lori Andrews “demonstrated a remarkable capacity to produce blues-bent improvised lines,†but to what end? Phyllis Battle may have been ebullient, but was she in good voice?
My reader’s question deserves an answer. It’s true that if I had loved it, if I thought it was the greatest music I had ever heard, I would have said so, probably with exclamatiuon marks. I might even have gushed as I have done on rare occassion, such as a review I wrote of Lynne Arriale Trio: Live at The Montreux Jazz Festival for Jazz Improv a few years back. You can read the whole review if you’d like, but here’s a taste of me gushing:
The bossa-tinged ballad “Estate†has all of the complexity and delicacy of a spider web. From the beginning to the end of this nine-minute track, goose bumps ripple through my soul and I am caught in this perfectly formed, beautiful trap. After Ms Arriale proves once again that a beautiful melody can stand alone, she adds layers while twisting and turning the lines as if reflected through a prism. The beautiful melodic bass solo is laden with pregnant notes and again, as is true throughout, Davis’s percussive contributions are so tasteful and delicate at times that I feel I must call your attention to the lyricism in his playing.
Conversely, I don’t like to write bad reviews, so if I had thought the music was really awful I would not have even mentioned it, let alone posted a link to the musician’s web site.
Now you’re still wondering what I thought, and the truth is that I was intrigued because I wasn’t really sure what I thought. The clips are short and without context, but snippets of what I heard were atmospheric, aural paintings evoking a mood. That’s good, and if I were to hear a whole piece, to hear the shape in it’s entirety and take the journey from beginning to end, I might have a clearer opinion…pro or con. But in all likelihood, this is music I would not have “reviewed” because I don’t have a feel for it. That doesn’t mean it’s bad, but it may be beyond my comfort zone.
My personal tastes are not very adventurous — I like to be able to identify the melody and follow the harmonic changes. Rhythmically, I like to be able to feel “one” and when I get lost, finding it again makes me smile. That’s the joy of listening to a master improviser like Sonny Rollins (or my dad, for that matter) — they take you on trips and if you get lost, they’ll eventually bring you back home. Perhaps my ears are not big enough to adequately follow this young man’s music; I can’t follow Ornette Coleman, either. No, I’m not equating the two, just trying to say that I don’t believe it fair to pass judgement on things I don’t yet understand. But bottom line: to me, intriguing is a good thing. If you arouse my interest and capture my attention, you’ve accomplished something.
The other day, when mentioning mail and new buddies, I forgot to tell you about Russ. He found his way to DevraDoWrite via a link on Doug Ramsey’s Rifftides blog, which he discovered from reading the Paul Desmond piece at Jerry Jazz Musician. In today’s world where many of use wear multiple hats, it’s not a big surprise (albeit a very pleasant one) to find that we knew one another indirectly.
…in one of those ‘small world’ coincidences; I know of you through my experience as a jazz concert producer. From 1986 to 1992 I produced a summer Jazz series in Mt Gretna, a small mountain resort town in Central Pennsylvania. During those six years I featured, among others, Joe Williams and Jim Hall. Thus, I recognized you from the publicity materials for Jim & Joe.
Back then, I was a publicist for lots of great jazz folks, Joe, Jim, Carmen McRae, Eddie Harris, and Thad Jones, to name just a few.
Russ continues:
In another coincidence, in 1980 I became one of the founders of a regional jazz society, the Central PA Friends of Jazz. One of our regular performers in the early days was Harrisburg resident J.J. Wiggins. In more recent time the Friends of Jazz staged a Father’s Day performance by Gerald and J.J. Wiggins at the annual Central PA Jazz Festival. In fact, I recorded the concert for the local public radio station.
By the way, the juvenile jazz group with which J.J. Wiggins got his start was the Craig Hundley Trio, not Huntley. I recall seeing the group several times when they appeared with Johnny Carson. Here’s a link to the cover art for the album they recorded.
Russ mentions Wig and J.J. because he noticed my bio of Gerald Wiggins, here. He’s the first to have noticed my mistake (even Wig did not catch it), and now I’ve corrected it.
By day, Russ is webmaster for WITF, but recently he has resurrected his weekly radio show via Internet. He explains:
I became a part of the local jazz community through my work as a jazz disc jockey. I produced a weekly show entitled “My Favorite Things†from 1970 to 1992. In 1990 I took over the jazz feature writing slot with the Harrisburg daily newspaper. The writing gig fell victim to the changing economics at the newspaper. Last month, for reasons which still escape me, I decided to revive the radio show online…
So check out My Favorite Things, that’s the name of my new good buddy’s show.
While two little words — “thank you” — can mean a great deal, sometimes the words “I’m sorry” seem inadequate. I owe an apology to a young guitarist from Berlin who spent a great deal of time transcribing some of my father’s recordings and then gave him electronic copies with permission to use them on his web site. Much of dad’s web work passes through my computer, so it was I who should have thanked Johannes promptly for his gift, but I didn’t. He waited ten days before inquiring as to whether we had received the files — not so very long, but seemingly forever in these days of instant messaging.
Think about it. It took only minutes for his gift to travel from Berlin to Los Angeles, why should it take weeks for a simple reply? It shouldn’t. I’ve sent him an email apology, but perhaps I can give him a gift now by bringing him to the attention of DevraDoWrite readers — some of you may well enjoy his music. Guitarist/composer Johannes Haage is in his late twenties. I can’t tell you much more about him as I do not read German, but I did listen to some of the audio clips on his web site and found them intriguing.
One of the things I love about the blogosphere is that I feel like I’ve got a whole bunch of new colleagues whom I think of as “my buddies” even though I’ve never met them, and in some cases, we’ve never even spoken or corresponded directly. One such good buddy is Carl Abernathy who resides terrestrially in West Lafayette, IN and blogospherically at Cahl’s Juke Joint . Carl was kind enough to write in response to TK:
Newspaper and magazine folks used to intentionally misspell words that were used as instructions for composition folks. A “lead” became “lede,” for example. They did this to avoid confusion when type was still set in hot lead. You wouldn’t want the composition guys to think your instructions were part of a story.
I know that HTK was used for “head to come (kome).” So, I’d assume that TK had the same origin.
Makes perfect sense to me. I guess it got ol’ Carl to thinking, cause he emailed a second time:
I checked a little more on definitions of some of the journalism terms we still use. There’s not a lot of information online, but HTK was an abbreviation for Hed tokum.
Anyone else care to weigh in?