Don't Migrate to the Facile

Folks, I strongly encourage you to read this comment on my Wood Heat post. When you get to the end, keep reading; his comment is in two parts. It's a great read, eloquently describing why I enjoy vinyl so much (well, part of the reason) and also why I own a turntable from around 1960 (a Thorens TD-124; I'll tell its story later on this blog when I find the time), and why I spent part of this past weekend rebuilding the turntable's motor. Such activities -- and the vinyl rituals shared with friends -- help to forge a personal connection to the music (and the equipment it's reproduced on) that goes missing in MP3 downloads, and that's essential to maximum enjoyment. Here's a taste of the comment:

There is something to be said about W O R K. There is also something to be said about connecting with multiple senses. Not everyone will agree but so far, by my count, the numbers are in favour of those that want to connect over those that don't. I've already dragged a few friends over to this dark side of life. The harder working side, but in the end they seem more satisfied. I wouldn't say I try to struggle through everything I do but in the things I enjoy, I tend to. Wine, photography, computers (I roll my own linux, not distro-centric, I mean from the kernel up!) and audio. I feel closer to the creators, closer to my peers and closer to myself, connecting with me on levels that would otherwise be wasting away from disuse. Call it lethargy of the brain, but I tend to think that folks who migrate to the facile on a regular basis waste away.

I make my living as the editor of an online publication. I work remotely, from home. I communicate by IM, email, and occassionally telephone. I maintain a Twitter feed. Nearly every professional thing I do is on the Internet.

Yet I often fantasize about starting up a new publication, one that completely forgoes new technology, using the telephone, the train, and the car; visiting libraries to do research; doing on-site reporting whenever possible; printing on old-fashioned printing presses. So when "anonymous wrote the following," I cheered:

It's sad when I gather with my mates, early to mid thirty year olds, and they complain about feeling less than whole. Given my friends, my first and continual proclaimation is: "Disconnect yourselves!" Yank the plugs to everything and see the people around you. Get back to nature, go hiking, better yet go camping, real camping! Join a sports team, join a club that isn't a computer-centric one (for my friends anyhow). Do something with people! These guys are married, most have one child, and they feel lost and numb and lonely and are depressed. Some struggle to listen to music, something we all enjoyed as teens growing up. Why? Because the idea of flipping through 25 000 tracks is daunting. It's a chore now.

Let me add an insight I had years ago that, in a way, is along the same lines. There was a time when I used money as a sort of stimulant. It's not that I had a lot of it -- I didn't -- but I got a charge out of buying new stuff, even if it wasn't anything especially valuable or interesting. I'm not over it -- I still do this -- but I'm not as bad as I used to be.

In those days, I always hated it when the bills came due. My wife paid them. When she started, I left the room. I didn't like to watch.

Then one day, not long after I bought a house (and took out a mortgage) I understood that there's another way of looking at things. If you live according to your principles -- if you buy and spend time on things you value -- then the spending is something to celebrate. Making the mortgage payment on my house became a pleasant ritual, a way of celebrating that gave pleasure and meaning to my life (in stark contrast to the junk I sometimes bought to stimulate those short-term burst  of neurotransmitters).

At some level we all know this already, or most of us: Convenience is over-rated. To extract value from things, sometimes you have to invest in them, work at them. If you don't know this, try it out. You won't be sorry.

New Science Result: Even Stimuli We Aren't Aware of Can Affect What We Perceive

A paper out this week in the journal Current Biology includes a result that could be of interest to those who are interested in high-end audio. It's important to note, however, that the phenomena explored here are visual, not aural, so, while there tend to be similarities in how information from different sensory systems are processed, one should not automatically assume that the results apply to aural phenomena as well.

Learning to Use an Invisible Visual Signal for Perception shows that certain visual "percepts" can affect how we perceive other things, even if we aren't aware of them. Specifically, they used "a visual signal whose perceptual consequences were made invisible -- a vertical disparity gradient masked by other depth cues" to investigate how people responded to an image, in this case an image of a rotating cylinder. Participants were asked to identify the direction of rotation of the cylinder. The image could be controlled so that it could appear to be rotating in either direction -- or the apparent direction of rotation could be rendered ambiguous. The researchers found that when the direction was ambiguous, they could affect the perception of the direction of its rotation with invisible visual cues. "This approach excluded high-level influences such as attention or consciousness," they scientists write in a summary.

The phrase "invisible visual cues" sounds like an oxymoron, but apparently it isn't. These are cues that stimulate activity in the brain, but not conscious awareness. We see them, but we don't know we see them.

In a way, the result isn't so surprising. What I think it's saying is that you can alter the perception of a visual phenomenon by altering what we see in ways we are not consciously aware of.

If we assume this applies to aural phenomena as well (and I cannot rigorously justify such an assumption), it's easy to see how rich and difficult the task of critical listening is. It's fair to assume that it isn't just influences rigged in a laboratory that can have an effect. All sorts of influences we aren't aware of -- and I'm talking about perceptual cues and not marketing messages -- are likely to influence how we perceive things.

Wood Heat

Here's an essay I wrote about 10 years ago, for the publication The Post-Careerist, which no longer exists. I'm posting it here because a post on the Audio Asylum reminded me of it, and I wanted to be able to link to it.

April 14, 2000

Wood Heat

My son was born in late December, 1997. When I went home to get the house ready for his arrival in early January the temperature outside was three degrees Fahrenheit, and the temperature inside the house was forty-three degrees.

When I went inside that day I panicked a little. It was freezing in there. I didn't want to take off my minus-twenty-rated down parka. How could I bring my new little boy (seven pounds, fourteen ounces) into that frigid house? Just for a minute I thought about getting a hotel room.

Then I wadded up some old newspaper and put it in the wood stove, added a few sticks of softwood kindling and a couple of small, dry chunks of birch and oak, and lit a match. The hardwood was well aged, the chimney drafted well, and the fire caught right up. by the time I put my groceries away, straightened up a bit, and vacuumed the floor, the temperature was at fifty-eight and climbing steadily. I added more wood before I left for the hospital, and when we brought my son inside and put him in his crib the house was cozy and warm.

We don't have central heat. There's a small but effective direct-vented space heater in the family room, and another one upstairs (to keep things from freezing when we leave for a few days), but most of our heat is provided by a large wood stove, which sits in the middle of the living room.

There are times when I'd kill for central heat, like when I get home at the end of the day and I've got to haul firewood into the house. Or when it's two a.m. and zero out and I admit to myself that those few small embers are not going to keep the house warm until morning, and I have to trek outside to the woodpile. (I did it once in my underwear at minus five. We live in the country with no neighbors to call the police, but I doubt I'll do it again.) When I haul wood into the living room I always leave a trail of bark and dirt that has to be cleaned up; I don't even want to talk about the mess cleaning out the ashes makes. On the other hand, we've got a broom and a really good vacuum cleaner, and now that I've got the routine down it isn't so bad.

We keep a wood rack in the family room. It holds about a sixth of a cord of wood, and needs to be refilled about once a week in the spring and fall, twice a week midwinter. It only takes twenty minutes to fill it up if I work hard, a dozen or so trips to the woodpile, but often when I get home after work in the afternoon I just don't want to do it.

An interesting thing happens when I do this chore after a long, stressful day. When I start, I'm watching the clock. I'm counting sticks of wood, counting trips to the house. At a certain point I lose track: was that the fifth load or the sixth? Not that it matters, it's just a nervous habit. What's interesting is that when I start losing the count it isn't because I'm daydreaming. I'm not brooding about this little problem or that. I lose myself in the work, not in my thoughts. When I'm done I always feel better than when I started. The rest of my day goes better. I'm more relaxed, more engaged.

There are other advantages to wood heat. It's good to have a source of heat in the middle of the room, a place to gravitate towards when you come in from outside to warm your hands, to pull up a chair, pull off your boots, put up your feet, and stare at the fire. I never met anybody (except a cat) that huddled up to a ventilation duct. It's funny that they call it "central heat" when its defining characteristic is that it's not central - it's dispersed. A wood stove really is central.

There's a bar near my home, in my favorite small city in the world, Portland, Maine. It's called Gritty McDuff's. They brew their own beer there. I don't go there much because I'm not a big beer drinker and I live a ways outside of town. But whenever I walk by it I notice something interesting: many tables are empty but the bar is crowded with people, three or four deep. People gravitate to the bar, the central point, especially when it's cold outside. The bar, like my wood stove, brings people together.

Less than a week after we brought our new son home, in those first days of 1998, the region was hit with an ice storm the likes of which hadn't been seen for a hundred years or so. My son was one week old. We sat in the living room and listened to the trees falling in the forest - on average, one tree every minute at the peak. It was like a war zone. Nearby, television, radio, and cell phone towers crumpled under the weight of accumulated ice. The pole at the end of our driveway collapsed, taking the neighborhood transformer with it. We were without power for two weeks. To our surprise, our phones still worked, so we called our friends in town, who lived in modern houses with "central" heat. They were huddled in their bedrooms under down, eating tuna fish and Vienna sausages. We made big pots of soup on the wood stove - we even baked bread. We were cozy, warm, and happy. When my son got hungry and woke in the night I got up and stoked the fire, added some wood, lit a few candles and oil lamps. My wife got the baby out of the crib and took him to the sofa. I helped them get settled in and we sat on the sofa as my wife nursed our baby back to sleep.

That would be a great place to end this article, but I can't do it because it's not finished yet. I have to be clear about what I'm saying. I'm no survivalist. I don't think you should get a wood stove so that you'll stay warm during the next big ice storm, or whatever public-service disaster awaits. We got through Y2K, without a hitch. I'm not saying you should get a wood stove at all - that's up to you. What I'm getting at is that sometimes things that seem like a lot of trouble, that seem like a nuisance or a complication, are really some of the very best things. I read an interview the other day with Jerry Yang, one of the guys who started Yahoo. It laid out a picture of the future that I didn't much care for. The interviewer, a web-zine called Context, asked:

I can imagine that when my six-year-old becomes a teenager, I’m going to have very different conversations with her than I had with my parents when I was that age. I’ll say things such as, Shannon, how many times do I have to tell you that when you finish a box of cereal you have to debit the pantry? How else will our home network know to order more?

Yang's answer isn't important. What's important is the Jetson's-like world the question implies. I'm no luddite. Heck, I love technology. I spend hours every day parked in front of a computer, and for the most part I enjoy it. I'm just saying that sometimes it's hard to figure out what the best part of your life really is. Beyond the obvious things like friends and family, it isn't always easy to know. If people eliminate all the inconvenient, bothersome stuff from their lives, they might end up with no life left, and that wouldn't be a good thing.

Wilbur Ware and the Chicago Sound

My latest LP acquisition: The Chicago Sound, the Wilbur Ware Quintet featuring Johnny Griffin, on Riverside: RLP 12-252. Actually, that's not quite right; that was the number for the original release on Riverside. This is a reissue, on Milestone,  SMJ-6048M. It was bought at Enterprise Records, aka Friendly Bob's, on Congress Street in Portland, Maine. It set me back $7, in pristine condition.

(Sorry about the quality of the photos;
I need to get out my better camera.)

Aside from Wilbur Ware on bass and Johnny Griffin on tenor sax, this album has John Jenkins on alto, Junior Mance on piano, Wilbur Campbell and Frank Dunlop alternating on drums.

So who are these guys? Let's start with the leader. The name Wilbur Ware was familiar, but it took me a while to remember why. He played bass for Thelonious Monk for a while, including on the Riverside LP Monk Meets Mulligan, also on Riverside, which is one of the finest-sounding LPs I own, even if it is a bit conventional and musically boring. (I love it all the same.) Ware also played, as I have just learned, on Thelonious Monk with John Coltrane and on Monk's Music. He's also the bassist on Sonny Rollins's Night at the Village Vanguard. So: Good dates. No slouch.

Almost everything Ware recorded was between 1956 and 1959, though he did a date with Grant Green in 1961 (Standards, on Blue Note), Apparently, after hitting it rather large in the late '50s, he vanished for the rest of the decade. He reemerged briefly in 1969, appearing with Rollins, Clifford Jordan, and Elvin Jones, then vanished again. He died in 1979, of emphysema.

Dunlop, too, played with Monk: Looking through my Monk collection, I find him on Monk's Dream and Misterioso (on three tracks). The other drummer -- this combo's second Wilbur (Wilbur Campbell) was a Chicago musician who was very well known on a very vibrant local scene but didn't go on tour; he recorded with the Chicago label Delmark (owned by the guy who runs Jazz Record Mart in Chicago).* If you want to learn more about Campbell, check out this page on Delmark's site. (Here's a tidbit, after Campbell's recent death, in his obituary in the Chicago Tribune; "Jackie" DeJonette is quoted: "When [Campbell] would play the drums, he would fill up his solos like somebody was packing a suitcase with as much as he could. ... He was one of the great drummers of the world, even though a lot of people didn't know it."

John Jenkins, the alto player, is another musician who disappeared. Here's what Wikipedia says:

After leaving the jazz world he worked as a messenger in New York and dabbled in jewelry; he sold brass objects at street fairs in the 1970s. After 1983 he began practicing again and playing live on street corners; shortly before his death he played with Clifford Jordan.

Junior Mance, the pianist, is another Chicago musician. He has played with pretty much everyone. Apparently, he's still going strong. He'll turn 82 next week. 

*   *   *

So what about this record? It sounds great. The music is easy to digest. This is one of those mono LPs where you absolutely do not miss the stereo. There may not be any left to right separation, but it's nice and fat, and there is enough front to back separation that you get a sense of musicians in space, even if they're not playing in stereo.

The music is pretty much straight-ahead jazz. I can't quite think of what other artists it reminds me of. One comparison, which I realize is fairly strange, is to some of the later small-group Ellington recordings. Actually, it sounds like a lot of things.

But the real story here is the sound; it's a superb-sounding LP. Unsurprisingly for an LP that has a bassist for a leader, there's a lot of solo bass, and it's clear, woody, and upfront. Both saxophones are warm and breathy; when one stops and the other starts, you can really get a sense for their distinctive sounds. Piano sound is crisp with a clear, woody tone. The top end is slightly subdued -- not really rolled off -- and this gives the whole ensemble an appealing, breathy warmth.

I have never understood it when people say they listen to music, not sound. To me, music is sound -- organized sound. The breath in a wind instrument, the wood and rosin in a bowed double bass, are for me as much a part of music as the rhythm.

But the individual characteristics of the musicians is another thing I like to listen for. That's easy when it's say, Monk, but a little trickier, maybe, when comparing less distinctive sidemen. I'm looking forward to comparing the different drummers in this ensemble, to identify their styles. I'll report back.
 
So: On a first, superficial listen, I'm hearing good playing, excellent sound, but no life-altering jazz. That's OK; I'm having a damn good time. Highly recommended. 

* One day a couple of years ago, when I was visiting Chicago on business, I visited Jazz Record Mart. While I was there, a personable old fellow struck up a conversation as I browsed the Duke Ellington bins. He told me about his video projects and his movie collection -- as in, actual films, in canisters. I didn't figure out until later that I was conversing with Bob Koester, the legend.)

Jazz, etc. -- Want to Help?

It has been nearly a year since, on a cold November evening in Maine when I had had too much to drink and just the right amount of jazz on vinyl, I spontaneously bought up this GREAT domain name, which just happened to be available, and committed myself to an new project: A new blog focused on jazz, and especially on jazz experienced on older vinyl -- not fancy, expensive Blue Note first editions (I do love them so, but can't afford them) -- but just good music on good-sounding vinyl that has a history.

The point would be to describe, in plain language, the experience of listening to the music, the way the music sounds on disk, in a way that shows respect for that medium and the object -- that chunk of plastic with its cardboard cover, with, perhaps, some notes written on the side, or whatever. Though I don't know a lot about the music and the musicians, I might do a bit of research and write something about that, too. This is not audio reviewing, or music reviewing -- it's writing about the pleasure to be found on listening to music on vinyl. I was sure it would be a fun project, and an interesting read for those who care about these things.

I find that my best ideas come when I am drunk. The problem with the ideas I have when I am drunk is with the follow-through. The inspiration passes, real life starts back, and the idea that was so good -- and that remains good -- fades into the background. That happened here. The blog never really got off the ground.

But here's the thing: This ain't new technology we're talking about here. What's the rush, really, when you're writing about 50-year-old records? I still own the domain name. There's no reason I can't start now, just a year or so later than planned. And -- here's my big new insight -- I don't have to do this alone.

So, if you're reading this and you'd like to contribute, drop me a note. Just comment on this post, send me an email, or whatever (jim-dot-austin-at-gmail-dot-com). Doc Notathing, I've been especially impressed with your writing and your knowledge in the comments you have left. I think it would be great if you would contribute.

- Jim, who is currently sober.

Horace Silver with The Jazz Messengers

Listening tonight to Columbia CL 897, The Jazz Messegers, with Byrd, Mobley, Silver, Watkins, and Blakey.

Thoughts:

• Byrd's trumput has a lovely sound. Also love the piano sound from Silver -- always loved that on this album. 
• Also: Never realized how much (especially early) Wynton Marsalis was influenced by Blakey. I know that's not news, and it's hardly surprising, but I just noticed it.

Generally, great mono sound, but some break-up in the right channel on It's You or No One: Is that inner-groove distortion or a worn LP? 

Another Reason to Love Vinyl: The Album Side

Not that we needed another reason, but...

CDs, with 60+ minutes of undifferentiated songs, are too long. I mean that in two ways. First, that's a lot of space to fill with good tunes, so most CDs have filler. Next, it's too long, for me at least, to really take it all in. That means that when I have a CD I tend to listen song by song, not to whole albums.

Maybe it's because I grew up with them, but to me LP albums are about the right length.But LPs have another advantage: they have sides, and that's a great thing. 20+ minutes or so of music. It's a disadvantage in classical, where long movements often have to be broken up in the middle. But for jazz and popular music, it's just right. It's another way of dividing up the music. An album might not be great, but it might nevertheless have a great side.

My latest example -- file this under "etc." and not jazz -- is from Sonic Youth's latest LP, The Eternal (Matador, Ole 829-1). Side 4 is a great rock music side. True, it's a bit derivative, knocking off Velvet Underground, REM, maybe Radiohead. But it's the first rock album -- or rather, album side -- that I've become obsessed by in at least 20 years. (You know the feeling: When you're awake, you want to be listening. When it finishes, you want to start it over again.)

It's just three songs, the second of which (the REM clone, called "Walking Blue") is fabulous.

One complaint: The packaging of this LP, though pretty, is inept. It's very difficult to get the records out of their stiff cardboard sleeves, and impossible to do it without some superficial scraping of the record's surface. So now I store these records outside their cardboard sleeves, in paper-and-rice-paper after-market inner sleeves. But there's already some damage (though it's not audible) from the first couple of times I removed the black disks from their original holders.