The Afterword

Musings on the byways of popular culture

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If We’re Celebrating Jazz Legends, How About Wayne Shorter. 87 years old this past Tuesday. Still here.

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One of jazz music’s most prolific and creative composers. A tenor (and later soprano) saxophonist of distinction. He first came to prominence with Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers in 1959, where he quickly became Art’s musical director and composed many pieces. He moved on to Miles Davis’ second great quintet where he again was a major composer and, according to his bandmate Herbie Hancock, was the only one that Miles didn’t need to rearrange compositions from as they arrived fully-formed. He released loads of excellent albums for Blue Note at that time as well. After leaving Miles he formed the mighty and innovative Weather Report with Joe Zawinul. A close pal of Joni Mitchell’s, he’s played on several of her albums. He’s no longer playing live, due to health issues, but he’s still composing. A slightly-late Happy Birthday To You!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayne_Shorter_discography

Picture Disc Art.

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Musing upon the late lamented Judy Dyble’s brief stint with Giles, Giles & Fripp briefly before they morphed into King Crimson, I remembered another female vocalist of that time Sonja Kristina of Curved Air. Then I recalled their debut album, Airconditioning, which was the first picture disc I had ever seen. A particularly magnificent example IMO. High quality designs on each side of a disc which probably was sonically pretty awful. This was nearly 50 years ago and my-fi was not hi-fi in those days, so I don’t remember if it sounded like chips frying throughout or not. I do recall it looked bloody good on the turntable. A picture disc, 50 years ago! Blimey. Any personal favourites, AW fam?

Nearly naked Florida man rides bike backward on Interstate …

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Feeling a bit bored? Need something completely pointless and hopefully amusing to pass a few seconds of your time?

Go to Google and in the search box type: Florida Man and whatever your birthday is. You will almost certainly get a really stupid headline from a news article. No need to put your birthday in your reply if you don’t want to, but tell us what you got. The thread title above is what I got for mine.

UK Radio Show Archives

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When he’s not bellringing, baking bread, curing his own bacon or travelling the land by narrowboat, my old friend Ben collects and archives UK radio comedy shows. He has a huge ever-growing downloadable archive, regularly updated as missing, incomplete or flawed episodes come to light, meticulously documented and in the case of some of the shows, absolutely complete. Probably the most complete archive of this stuff in existence. You are welcome to download anything that takes your fancy (but not everything all at once, please, because that would be greedy) at no cost whatsoever, although donations are always appreciated.

http://www.bennewsam.co.uk/Archives.shtml

Dusted Off: My STD 305D Turntable.

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A couple of months ago I dusted off my old late ’70s turntable, which I got s/h sometime in the later ’80s. I gave it a bit of an overhaul (cartridge alignment, tracking weight, anti-skid, levelling etc) and played a couple of albums. It was reluctant to start up at first (unresponsive control touch pads – see photo) but then it decided that it was going to work after all. I’d not used it at all since then but yesterday, having moved it and the rest of my audio stuff to a new position in the room I thought I’d play an album or two. Once again it would not start up unless the relevant touch pad was repeatedly tapped until it responded. Unresponsive touch pads seem to be a common fault on these decks as they get old. After it had been playing for a bit however, the touchpad response was fine. It sounds pretty good, within the limitations of the rest of my fairly inferior setup. These decks seem to be pretty well-regarded by turntable enthusiasts. It doesn’t have the original tonearm, as the previous owner fitted a Stax UA-7 with what looks like a carbon fibre pipe » Continue Reading.

Album Running Order vs. Live Show Running Order.

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It has become a trend for heritage bands to perform their best-regarded albums live in their entirety. To my mind there are many good or even great albums that just don’t work well as live sets. The dynamic of them is just not right for live performance, usually due to that old bugbear Front Loading.

Most classic albums are too short to make a decent live set (an hour is a decent live set IMO and I expect two of them) in any case, unless you stretch the performance with extended banter, extra instrumental widdling, adding lengthy crash-bang endings or by repeating verses and/or choruses.

Alter Egos

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There are quite a few artists with alter egos for when they are doing something a bit different to what they’re known for. Paul McCartney as The Fireman, John Lurie of The Lounge Lizards as The Legendary Marvin Pontiac, Phil Collins’ jazz-prog venture Brand X, Anna Meredith’s twin careers as orchestral composer and electronic musician, Jim Mullen as jazz guitarist and his continuing membership of funksters Kokomo. One I discovered just today, rising jazz guitarist star Shirley Tetteh has also recorded some left-field pop as Nardeydey. I expect you lot could name a few more alter egoists.

The 10 Best Jazz Albums of 2019?

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Here’s an interesting little list, with a short note about each selection, from Treblezine, a source with which I’ve not previously been familiar. There are a few here that I know and like and some more that I now intend to explore. Last year was a pretty good one for jazz, IMO, and this one has too. If not even better.

Any other 2019 jazz lists, anyone?

https://www.treblezine.com/best-jazz-albums-of-2019/?fbclid=IwAR00UgF-UQKnMJXuUptQ-Mw3y0hgUazp0SzDJSYJNsi1uJx2riyNILmXV2g

Women In Jazz: Yazz Ahmed Electric Dreams, Rosie Turton Quintet (+1), Alina Bzhezhinska

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Venue:

The Jazz Café, Camden London

Date: 03/10/2019

An excellent triple bill on a £12.50 ticket (plus £2 booking fee) got me out on a Thursday night to a venue I don’t like very much. Why don’t I like it? Virtually no seating unless you pay extra to get a table in the upstairs restaurant. Expensive bar with poor choice of beverages. Anyway. First up was a half-hour unaccompanied set by harpist Alina Bzhezhinska, playing some Alice Coltrane (Blue Nile) and Dorothy Ashby (Action Line) plus three of her own (I think) pieces. subtle looping and effects were applied but not to the detriment of the music. Pin-drop quiet from the audience, which was a very unusual thing at this venue. They loved it. After about 15 minutes setup (removing the full-size harp from a stage full of other equipment and instruments took a while)and rearrangement, trombonist Rosie Turton and her band (Johanna Burnheart – electric violin, Maria Chiaro Argirò – electric piano, Twm Dylan – double bass, Jake Long – drums and guest Ben Hayes – synths & effects) started their half-hour set consisting mainly of material from her Rosie’s 5ive album. No idea of titles except Orange » Continue Reading.

Happy Birthday Cyberspace!

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On October 29th 1969 the first message was sent through the ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency NETwork) between the four remotely located computers that it consisted of. The message was “LO”. It was supposed to be “LOGIN” but the network crashed after the first two letters. And so what eventually became the Internet was born.

https://daily.jstor.org/happy-birthday-to-cyberspace/?utm_campaign=JSTOR&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&utm_content=1570030918&fbclid=IwAR0X4uINziDIMPn0Xtm2aEIeOPaEpRxrO30dpIPRlhdMl2Oaaupnqxq-pWc

It’s Jazz and Therefore of Limited Appeal Here

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Sheila Maurice Grey is a young British jazz trumpeter of exceptional skill. Also a vocalist, composer and visual artist but that last attribute and the singing are not what I want to talk about here. She is the bandleader of Kokoroko and plays with the female jazz septet Nérija, who have just released an excellent new album entitled “Blume” which can be found on Spotify.

Presuming the link I’ve attached works, here is some of a live set she recently played with her own band Ms Maurice at London’s Pizza Express jazz club.

If you like jazz you might like it. If you don’t you can move on to another AW thread.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0007xy8

Planning Success For The Stables

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At a well-attended public Council meeting on August 1st, it was unanimously agreed by the Council that a Deed Of Easement would be placed on approved development works adjacent to the Stables site. The developers must inform any new residents in advance of the venue’s presence and the possibility of some noise and that their right to raise noise nuisance complaints will be restricted.

https://www.mkfm.com/news/local-news/the-stables-is-saved/

R.I.P. João Gilberto, Bossa Nova Legend

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88 and finally out on Saturday. Lots of loving tributes from his contemporaries and fans. Just a rather sour and grudging acknowledgement from Brazil’s right-wing president. I’ve avoided posting the obvious clip, even though it’s a beautiful thing, especially the full album version where he sings it first in Portugese before his missus gives us the English translation.

Brazilian guitarist/singer Mario Bakuna dedicated his set at the pub earlier this evening to his memory.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/07/brazil-mourns-death-of-musician-joao-gilberto

ATM: Digitising Hidden “Pre-Tracks” fom CDs. Anyone know how to do this?

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I’m currently working my way back through my CD collection ripping everything that was previously ripped as .mp3s and replacing them with .flac files. Going relatively smoothly until I came to Ash’s “1977”. The hidden pre-track (both sides of an old single) is recognised as being present by the software I’m using (Exact Audio Copy) but cannot be ripped. I suppose I could play it and record it on another device, but I’d rather just rip it if that’s possible. EAC shows that track 1 “Lose Control” starts at 5m38s (or thereabouts) on the disc and that there is a hidden track before it but it cannot “see” it to copy it. I’m not especially bothered about the Ash album pre-track, but there are a few other albums that I’ll be ripping eventually where I’d like to rip the pre-tracks too. Any ideas, anybody?