Ethan Iverson on Paul Bley

Paul Bley is the most influential jazz pianist you have never heard of.  And its not because he is an abstract, inaccessible, musician’s musician.  His playing is as lyrical and straightforward as Keith Jarrett.   Go to Pandora and create a Paul Bley station.  Here, I did it for you.

Ethan Iverson wrote an essay on Paul Bley, focusing especially on an album entitled Footloose! (which I have never heard.  I have stuck mostly to his solo stuff.)

Not just Jarrett and Corea but a whole generation of mostly caucasian post-1970 NYC jazz pianists checked out Footloose!: Richie Beirach, Joanne Brackeen, Jim McNeely, Marc Copland, Kenny Werner, Fred Hersch, etc., all seem to have made room for Paul Bley to hang at the same table that Bill Evans presides over. Bley’s peers Steve Kuhn and Denny Zeitlin seem to have paid attention, too. I suspect that not all these comparatively straight-ahead musicians paid the same kind of attention to more hardcore classic Bley albums like the ferocious Barrage or the minimalist Ballads. But since Footloose! is so swinging, it has always been interesting to just about everybody. Indeed, I believe that Bley’s influence crossed the color line with Geri Allen in the 80s and that now he is considered a resource for any curious musician regardless of background.

The article is typically brilliant Iverson writing, but this bit was just precious:

When I finally met Paul Bley a couple of years ago, I was about to go onstage with his old associate Charlie Haden. Bley was rather chilly at first handshake. These days he’s a famous contrarian, and I sensed I needed to not grovel but respond in kind. I leaned into him and told him, viciously, “I had all your records at one point. But you know what? I can’t play like you, and why would I want to? I gave all your records away when I was 24. I turned my back.”

Bley looked astonished, but then he grinned. “I’m glad you got rid of all my records, that’s what I tell all pianists to do.”

I responded, “Yeah…good. Well, recently I got some of your records, and I decided to love you again.”

Bley said, “That was a mistake. Get rid of my records.”

Plog

I listen to Pandora whenever I am in my office.  It does a pretty good job of finding music that matches my taste, sometimes a really good job.  In the past few weeks I’ve found some stuff that was completely new to me that I really liked.  I created a station based on these tunes:

1. Beep! Marty’s Mishap.  I have never heard of this trio and as far as I can tell google has not either. The rhythm is an instrument if that makes any sense.  This is exactly the kind of music I like.
2. Nels Cline, Alstromeria.  I don’t know how to classify this music.  The guitar playing is virtuosity without showing off.  The composition is academic without feeling pretentious.
3. Tomasz Stanko Quartet, Kattorna.  I first learned of this quartet in a roundabout way.  The rhythm section has a few albums as a trio (The Marcin Waslez-somethingPolish-ski Trio) that I found on Pandora and really like.  Then I learned that their main gig is this quartet led by trumpeter Tomasz Stanko.  The quartet may be even better.  Listen to what the piano is doing during the trumpet solos.
4. Erik Friedlander, Quake.  He plays cello.  Lots of other people play lots of other instruments.  Sometimes all at once.  The music ranges from controlled chaos to the beautifully melodic.
5. Rolf Lislevand, Toccata. Nuove Musiche with a modern sensibility.  Beautiful.
6. Moraz & Bruford, Living Space.  Piano and drums, that’s it.  But the pianist thinks he is playing the drums and the drummer thinks he is playing the piano.

All week this will be my music to read job-market files to.  Join me.

Write Your Own Verse to Memphis Blues

The full title of the Dylan tune is “Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again.”  When you have listened to that song as much as I have you start to notice the patterns.  Check out the lyrics.

1. Two four-line verses with xAyA rhyme scheme, followed by the chorus “Oh Mama, can this really be the end?…”
2. The first verse in the pair introduces a character and a scene and there is some hint of strangeness about it.  As with a lot of Dylan tunes the character is often a vague literary reference or some generic symbol of authority.  Sometimes both.
3. The narrator usually first appears in the second verse of the pair, possibly alongside a new character.
4. In the second half the narrator has some sense of disconnection with the scene/character and
5. It resolves in the last line with the narrator being tricked and we are left with a feeling of hopelessness or isolation. (the notable exception to this is the 6th verse were the narrator turns the tables on the character, the preacher. still this somehow makes for even more hopelessness.)

For example, the last verse in the song:

Now the bricks lay on Grand Street
Where the neon madmen climb. (#2a)
They all fall there so perfectly,
It all seems so well timed. (#2b)
An’ here I sit so patiently (#3) (#4)
Waiting to find out what price
You have to pay to get out of
Going through all these things twice. (#5)

You can almost use this as a recipe and write verse after verse of your own.  I have some kind of strange disease that makes me like to do stuff like that, so here goes.  My very own Memphis Blues verse:

Well the barrister wrote to Ahab
Pleading for his vote
And offering to serenade
At the launching of his boat

And the rickshaw driver said to me
Speeding to the dock
“They’ll tempt you with blue oysters
But serve you Brighton Rock.”

Oh, Mama…

Interview With Frank Portman

He is the singer and songwriter for The Mr. T Experience and he wrote King Dork.  His new book, Andromeda Klein is not as great but still good.  His next book is a King Dork sequel called King Dork, Approximately.  And a film adaptation of King Dork is in development with Will Ferrell producing.

Here is the inteview. And here is Frank Portman’s blog.

Palindromic Video

I once linked to something like this.  But that didnt hold a candle to this one:

Did you notice that when the song starts to go in the right direction his voice has an Eastern European accent?  I have no idea whether this guy is a native English speaker.  If he is then this is an artifact of singing backwards.  If he really is Eastern European then it says something about language accents that they appear even when singing a foreign language backwards.

Narayana Kocherlakota Named President of Minneapolis Fed

Read about it in the Wall Street Journal.

Many of his papers have been highly theoretical works focusing on imperfections in financial markets. “He’s probably the most abstract thinker ever to head a Federal Reserve bank,” said Robert Lucas, a Nobel Prize-winning economist who is serving as a consultant to the Minneapolis Fed.

Mr. Kocherlakota’s colleagues say he is a pragmatic person who is hard to identify fully with any one camp.

“He believes in the freshwater world, but he’s not that radical,” says Luigi Pistaferri, a frequent co-author with whom Mr. Kocherlakota worked for three years at Stanford University. “He agrees that there are market failures, and his attitude is, ‘How do we make the best of a world in which there are such failures?’ “

I once took Narayana to see The Bad Plus in Minneapolis on a visit there.  Narayana is Canadian I believe and that night they busted out Tom Sawyer.  I don’t think he was all that into it.

I assume this means we will need a new macro co-editor at Theoretical Economics.  Volunteers?

Remembering Lester Young

Ethan Iverson is a powerful force.  I heard him once say something like “By day I study jazz traditions, and by night, with the Bad Plus, I reject them.”  Here he is solidifying his cred on the first count with an unbelievable flurry of posts on Lester Young who was born 100 years ago this week.  Here you have “A Beginner’s Guide to the Master Takes,” “Miles Davis and Lester Young,” and piano transcriptions of famous Pres solos!!  All in all, 10 monumental articles.

Cranioklepty

Phrenology was the attempt to correlate physical features of the brain and skull with personality, intellect, creativity.  You got your data by plundering graves.

The three categories of individuals who were most interesting for finding out about the human mind were criminals, the insane, and geniuses, in the sense that they represented the extreme versions of the human mind …. It was easy enough to get the heads of criminals and the insane. Nobody wanted these, really. You could go to any asylum cemetery and root around and not be bothered, or hang out at the gallows and scoop up an executed criminal. Those two were pretty easy. Getting the heads of geniuses proved to be considerably more difficult.

Among the genius heads stolen and studied by phrenologists was Joseph Haydn’s.

The Unbundled Economy: Self-Promotion and Street Teams

The NY Times has an article about a new wave of independent films and their marketing.

When “The Age of Stupid,” a climate change movie, “opens” across the United States in September, it will play on some 400 screens in a one-night event, with a video performance by Thom Yorke of Radiohead, all paid for by the filmmakers themselves and their backers. In Britain, meanwhile, the film has been showing via an Internet service that lets anyone pay to license a copy, set up a screening and keep the profit.

The article is about the variety of roll-your-own distribution and marketing campaigns employed by filmmakers who lack studio backing.  But the lede is buried:

Famous fans like Courtney Love were soon chattering online about the film. And an army of “virtual street teamers” — Internet advocates who flood social networks with admiring comments, sometimes for a fee, sometimes not — were recruited by a Web consultant, Sarah Lewitinn, who usually works the music scene.

Here is wikipedia on street teams.  The origin is traced back to the KISS army, a grass-roots fan club that aggressively promoted the band KISS and later “vertically integrated” with the KISS marketing machine where they had access to exclusive promotional merchandise.

Today you can hire a consultant to assemble a street team to promote your band, movie, (hmmm… blog?), … A good consultant will find (or make) fans with a selected personality type, street-cred, and social network and organize them into a guerilla marketing squad armed with swag.

Virtual street teams operate in online social networks.  Presumably then, actual people are no longer required.  A good consultant can manufacture online identities, position them in a social network, getting Twitter followers and Facebook friends and cultivate the marketing opportunities from there.  You can imagine the pitch:  “We can mobilize 10,000 follower-tweets per day…”

Here is the web site of ForTheWin.com, the agency of Sara Lewitinn who coordinated the virtual street team for the film Anvil! The Story of Anvil.

For The Win! is an cooperative of club urchins and nightlife denizens charged with the task of defending the best of pop culture from the daily onslaught of the whack. At night we comb the streets in search of the best fashion, art, music, and movies New York City has to offer. By day we make sure we spread the word to the world by any and all means necessary of the internet to it’s biggest platforms without skipping a step or taking anything for granted. Each of our campaigns is as unique as the artist it represents.

Note they also count Slighly Stoopid, Electrocute, and The Pet Shop Boys (!) as clients.

Ethan Iverson Interviews Keith Jarrett

90 minutes, interspersed with Jarrett recordings spanning decades.  The interview covers early influences, the american quartet, the trio, what he looks for in “sidemen”, obeying the left hand and his recent solo work.  Jarrett seems particularly enthused about recent solo performances with a legendary London 2008 recording due out this fall.

Keith Jarrett Trio, KKL Lucerne, July 11 2009

The Starbucks index suggests that, as a rough rule of thumb, to get the Swiss price for something, double the US price i.e. a tall latte in Switzerland is twice the price of one in the US.  This rule works for concerts too meaning I paid a huge amount to see the Keith Jarrett Trio in Lucerne.

But it was worth it.  The concert hall itself, KKL Lucerne, is amazing.  The views of snow-capped mountains from the roof terrace creates just the right buzz for a concert.  The huge roof which overhangs the fountain reflects the lake and the boats as they come in or leave at the dock.  It’s a great place to have your beer before you head to your expensive seat.

And I’ve always found Keith Jarrett to be more compelling live than on CD.  There’s a warmth to his tone live that is missing in the excellent but cold ECM recordings, even of the live performances.  They ended with a song I did not recognize.   Jarrett played a repetitive and hypnotic four note theme with his left hand while improvising wildly with his right.  Peacock kept up a steady rhythm on the bass and De Johnette improvised with beats and sounds that you would never guess could come from a drumset.  I would love to identify the song but I can’t find a playlist on the web! Do this article or this one contain the playlist?

Bob Dylan, Thief

“Bob Dylan drew upon a rich lode of old folk tunes for most of his early songs,” Hyde writes. “That’s not theft; that’s the folk tradition at its best.” It seems that nearly two-thirds of Dylan’s work between 1961-63 — some 50 songs — were reinterpretations of American folk classics. In today’s corporate-creative environment, in which Disney was allowed to change the basic nature of copyright law back in the 90s so that their signature mouse wouldn’t fall into the public domain, Dylan’s early work would’ve landed him in court.

from a post at Mental Floss.  The punchline:

Hyde argues that “there are good reasons to manage scarce resources through market forces, but cultural commons are never by nature scarce, so why enclose them far into the future with the fences of copyright and patent?

I am generally opposed to IP law, but I think this oversimplifies.  There is room for argument about patents.  (For example, I came across this story today about drugs for rare diseases.  It is hard to see how drugs that will benefit a total of 3 people on the whole planet can be financed without monopoly rents.) However, copyright for music and other creative works is a solution to a non-existent incentive problem.

You’d Probably Get Used to a Sharp Stick in the Eye Too

Modern classical music, especially, is really hard.  What the hell are you listening too, this endlessly winding dissonant stuff without much melody?

The only way to get this kind of music in your ear is to listen to it over and over, which is what I have been doing with the first movement, “Prelude,” of the Maw Violin Concerto the last couple of days.  It doesn’t matter whether I want to hear it again or not:  I just play it again when it’s done.

When I cycle a piece of thorny orchestral music this way the fog slowly lifts, the picture clears, figure and ground separate.  Past pieces I’ve placed on endless loop have included Ligeti’s Melodien, Birtwistle’s The Triumph of Time, Lieberson’s Piano Concerto, and Schuller’s Of Reminiscences and Reflections. Initially they were all daunting listens but now they are old friends.  In every case I have learned to understand the composer’s acerbic language much better, so that new experiences with their other pieces aren’t as hard.

That’s Ethan Iverson who, in addition to being the piano player for the frontier jazz trio The Bad Plus, writes an outstanding blog, Do The Math.  This post clarified a lot for me.  Iverson is a broad, open-minded, and gifted musician and even he approaches contemporary classical music the same way my PhD students approach the Revenue Equivalence Thereom.  I have tried exactly what he describes here for Ligeti, etc.  and I have yet to turn that corner.

Miscellaneous Links

1. Next there will be scam-baiter-baiters, etc.
2. Psychological time travel.  Must have something to do with this.
3. Jazz and brain chemistry.

Pop Jazz

I was sitting in a restaurant last night when I spaced out and started listening to the jazz they were playing.  The song sounded familiar.  Perhaps the singer was Diana Krall?

I was wrong on the singer.   There’s no way Diana K would stoop so low as to sing the song I recognized -  “Everybody wants to rule the world” by Tears for Fears. It was followed by “Every breath you take” by the Police and, amazingly, “Boys don’t cry” by the Cure. All songs from my youth.  I never listen to them now.  They seem too childish.

In jazz format, (and I’m not kidding!) they initially take on the patina of sophistication.  Plus they transport you back to key events in your life – underage drinking, smoking etc….- that were accompanied by the songs.  So, doing Cure covers in a jazz format is going to open up a huge market if you do it right.  Wistful middle-aged adults with disposable income.  The problem is that listening to ten or more of these covers is going to make you throw up.  This was the flaw in the CD playing in the restaurant.  You have to mix things up with some real jazz.  You have to get Dina Krall to do the covers.  She’s married to Elvis Costello and has already compromised any purist principles she may once have held.  I want to hear her do some Dr Dre or Gnarls Barkley.  I’d buy that.

Pointers

1. The music of H1N1
2. Justice Souter retiring?
3. Hobbits.
4. DOJ investigating Google Books settlement.

Plogging

I listen to Pandora most of the time I am in my office.  Pandora is a free internet radio that personalizes musical selections based on feedback you give it.  For example, you can specify a song by an artist and it will find other songs that have similar qualities.  I thought it would be fun to listen for a little bit and write down my thoughts about the music that Pandora suggests.

I recently discovered (on Pandora!) the music of Patrick Moraz and Bill Bruford, a drum and piano duo that plays something between jazz and prog-rock.  I decided to use them as my starting point.  Here is what I heard: (you can listen to the same “station” by using this link. the tune selection is not deterministic so you will hear different music than i did, but in my experience it won’t take long before there is duplication.)

Omjhonz by Satoko Fujii and Tatsuya Yoshida.

this is my kind of music.  improvising the form and not just within the form.  its hard to coordinate this with more than two musicians.  given my choice of two, i go for piano and drums.  it works here because the pianist leans toward classical rather than “free jazz” which in settings like this usually skates off into dissonance.  I am thinking Cecil Taylor here.

Bekei by Dewey Redman/Cecil Taylor/Elvin Jones

Speak of the devil! But this one was just a drum solo by Elvin Jones.  A nice one, typical Elvin Jones, but still just a drum solo.  Never knew these three played together.  Have to bookmark this album for later Pandora fun.

Windy Mountain by Charles Lloyd and Billy Higgins

Duet of sax and drums.  More grounded in Jazz than any of the previous.  Charles Lloyd is good at this.  His work with Zakir Hussain is very similar.  Here Billy Higgins is playing very standard jazz rhythms.  A bass would fit in here.

The Drum Also Waltzes.  Patrick Moraz and Bill Buford.

Another drum solo.  Short.  I like it better than the Elvin Jones.

Double Image. Joe Zawinul.

Whoa, how did this get here?  This is essentially Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew carried on through Zawinul, Wayne Shorter and Miroslav Vitous who also went on to form Weather Report.  I like this much better than Weather Report.  Wait, Herbie Hancock too?  And I love the Vitous bowing on this tune.  Cool, but hard to see how it fits with the theme here. Wondering about Pandora.

Ran Blake “Thursday”

Never heard of Ran Blake.  Looking at the above link I see I am probably not alone.  But this is nice.  Solo piano.  A little Monk, a little Chick Corea.  And although that sounds like a recipe for disaster, it works for me.

Bottom line:  no keepers on this round.  I like Ran Blake, but its generic enough that I don’t imagine ever having a real craving for it.  I was glad to learn that Zawinul had some outings between Miles Davis and Weather Report.  The Japanese duo were the most interesting.  I will check them out again.  (on Pandora!)

Interpreting Data

According to a recent study, those who illegally download music are also significantly more likely to purchase music online legally via services such as iTunes.  It follows that the record labels should fight even harder to stop pirated music.  Explain.

The Bad Plus with Wendy Lewis in Concert

The Bad Plus is a unique piano trio that straddles jazz, rock, and classical and at their best combines all three.  In their most recent album, For All I Care, they are joined by vocalist Wendy Lewis who sings on a number of rock covers.  (Here was my review of the album.) Wendy Lewis is joining them on their current tour and Sandeep and I saw their Chicago show at the Old Town School of Folk Music on Friday 4/17 (the early show at 8PM.)

The show began with the trio alone playing some older tunes as well as the three classical pieces on For All I Care, Stravinsky’s Variation d’Appollon, Ligety’s Fem, and Semi-Simple Variations by Milton Babbitt.  This was an enjoyable mini-set and worth the price of admission, although in my opinion the band was not in top form.  The pianist Ethan Iverson was having somewhat of an off-night and failed to find the main groove on the improvised parts of “You Are” and “Dirty Blonde.”  His trademark foundation-shifting flourishes lose their punch without a smooth and deliberate buildup from the point of departure.  On the other hand, the classical pieces were all very tight and were the highlight of the show.  There was one new tune, an Ethan Iverson composition entitled “Bill Hickman at Home.”  This was a blues number with a very nice extended bass solo from Reid Anderson and some great playing from Iverson too.

Wendy Lewis joined halfway through the set and the band began with Lithium which also opens the album.  She successfully navigated the tempo changes that add an additional slant to the Nirvana original and her usual flat delivery worked well in this tune as it did for Kurt Cobain.  Up next was the Yes classic Long Distance Runaround, another very clever arrangement in which the jazzy instrumental part dissolves into a slow backdrop for Lewis’ powerful vocals.  Unfortunately these were the last successful combinations until the fiery encore of Barracuda which was also the best tune on the album.  The pretty chorus on Wilco’s Radio Cure could not recover from the dull, almost spoken-word delivery of the opening verses.  (Fortunately, at the end of the song the trio left her behind with a searching group-improvisation that began with drummer Dave King mysteriously massaging his skins with his elbow, built up to Iverson’s hands flying all over the keyboard and finished with a very satisfied audience.)

The next tune, Blue Velvet (not on the album) was a puzzling choice.  Wendy Lewis is a skillful vocalist and she can sing big on tunes like Barracuda, but her voice is not right for this song:  too flat and emotionless.  Finally, Comfortably Numb is one of the strong points of the album but on stage it was straightforward, uninspired rendition.

The Bad Plus are making some of the most innovative music in jazz today.  They are to be commended for experimenting, however in my opinion this experiment did not pay off.  I am looking forward to the next one.

Are Musical Emotions Instinctive or Learned?

I always wondered whether people in isolated cultures would understand the emotional message of the blues.  While it doesn’t go that far, a study seems to demonstrate that musical interpretation is to some extent universal.  (beanie bounce:  MindHacks.)

(Extra-)Ordinary People

Why did we decide to do this blog?  I’m not really sure.  A creative outlet?  A way to throw out random ideas? A vague hope that something fun might come out of it?  A replacement for endless websurfing?

Well, the “vague hope” rationale has already worked out.  Jeff and I had a wonderful time at our appearance on the Interview Show at the Hideout.  There are a lot of dimensions to why we enjoyed it and I’m sure we’ll both blog about it.  The thing I want to talk about now is the club itself and its owners.  It is a little west of the big Home Depot on North Av.  There is weird industrial stuff all around and a large filling station for trucks.  And slap bang in the middle of all of it is a little house which has been turned into this club.  I thought it would be full of truckers and instead it is weirdly middle class.  I had a Bell’s Oberon, definitely in the microbrew category. I could have been ironically postmodern and had a Hamm’s but I did not spot it in time.  I love the crappy end of American beer!

Jeff and I are too old to know about clubs but the Hideout gets rave reviews among the cognoscenti.  The owners, Tim and Katie Tuten, are very interesting.  You might expect some ex rockstar to own it.  Maybe,  Tim and Katie have this history in their deep, dark past.  Now, they have regular day jobs – Tim works in the Chicago Public Schools and Katie for a charity.  They’re also a little older than you might expect. (I hope they do not mind me saying this! ) They more than make up for it by having the extroversion and energy of twentysomethings.  Tim did a little stand-up before Mark Bazer came on. They also have incredible taste in music – that night’s act Anni Rossi was transporting.  Tim worked for Arne Duncan in Chicago and will join him in DC doing special events.  As we left, Katie  ran to the door and said all economist number-crunchers were welcome, except those from the University of Chicago.  I’m sure if she met Phil Reny, Roger Myerson etc she would welcome them too.

And I’d never have met them if it weren’t for this blog!  I also got to hang out with Jeff on his own, a rare thing as we’re so busy nowadays.  I enjoyed his humor while he dealt with my depression with grace.

I should think about some clever econ thing to blog about and see if it leads anywhere.

The Live Nation/Ticketmaster Merger

Because we hate them both, it is instinctual to hate the idea of a merger.  And indeed it is being looked at by the Justice Department.  There is a clear economic benefit of this merger:  eliminating double-marginalization. A monopoly causes an inefficiency because it sets price over marginal cost, resulting in too little output.  Live Nation is a monopoly but it sells its product through an intermediary, Ticketmaster, which is itself a monopoly.  That means that the “price” charged to Ticketmaster becomes Ticketmaster’s marginal cost, and Ticketmaster will fix an additional Monopoly markup over that.  This second source of inefficiency would be eliminated if Ticketmaster and Live Nation were to merge.

(This is somewhat over-simplified because they most likely use a more complicated contract than a price, but unless they use a very clever kind of contract, there will still be elements of double-marginalization.  And this very clever contract effectively creates a merger anyway.)

So when you read this post from Trent Reznor you should downplay his worries that the merger will result in an increase in ticket prices.  The auctions he imagines are already happening.  Nevertheless his other points are very interesting and worth a read.

And I would not worry that this vertical merger will shut out competition for ticket distribution.  First of all, Ticketmaster was doing fine at that already, and second, the only reason we cared about the Ticketmaster monopoly was the double marginalization.

The only argument I can see against the merger is that it throws up an barrier to competition with Live Nation for concert promotion.   You could certainly draw some graphs and show that this is a concern theoretically, but I don’t believe that the merger would be held up for this.

Bad Plus – “For all I care”

I went to see  a jazz  concert in Evanston a few weeks ago.  The band leader, a sax player, is a high-school friend of a colleague of mine at Kellogg.  The band did a Coltrane tribute.  All jazz players are in awe of Coltrane it seems, and none can escape his gravitational pull.  They also did a few songs of their own that were quite good.  There was little that was really original.  But I still left feeling moved because the sax player played with deep emotion with no hint of self-consciousness or cynicism.  On an extremely cold and snowy night, it left me with a feeling of melancholia that felt just right.

The Bad Plus makes “postmodern” jazz, the reverse of music played by the band in Evanston.  It can be original, very clever, self-knowing and ironic.  It is emotionally detached.  For it to work, all these sarcastic elements have to come together, otherwise you feel bored or disgusted by your own cynicism for listening to the stuff.

This CD is not successful.  Jeff is right – the recording is muddy and the singing swamps everything else.  It belongs in the same category as the Barolo I described below.

One song, a cover of Pink Floyd’s Comfortably Numb, sticks out for me, for a personal reason. I saw it performed by Dar Williams at the Steppenwolf.  I got dragged to the show but in the end I really enjoyed it.  I do like Dar’s songs but I also enjoyed the audience which seemed to be made up largely of lesbian couples.  Apparently, Dar maintained a sexual ambiguity for a few years.  This allowed her to satisfy listeners of all sexual orientations.  (It’s related in some way to paper I have on Saddam’s use of ambiguity about his weapons’ status to prevent escalation of war and also deter enemies at the same time.  The same principle is there but I can’t see the formal connection.)

I know Jeff would like to hang out with more lesbians but  as economists, we never really have the opportunity.  So the Bad Plus took me back to that night and I was happy, till the next song began.

Does the Web Decentralize?

I have been enjoying reading the blog of Seth Godin.  In a recent post he wrote the following.

It’s quite possible that the era of the professional reviewer is over. No longer can a single individual (except maybe Oprah) make a movie, a restaurant or a book into a hit or a dud.

Not only can an influential blogger sell thousands of books, she can spread an idea that reaches others, influencing not just the reader, but the people who read that person’s blog or tweets. And so it spreads.

The post goes in another direction after that, but I started thinking about this conventional view that the web reduces concentration in the market for professional opinions.  No doubt blogs, discussion boards, web 2.0 make it easier for people with opinions to express them and people looking for opinions to find those that suit their taste.

But does this necessarily decrease concentration?  If everybody had similar tastes in movies, say, the effect of lowering barriers to entry would be to allow the market to coordinate on the one guy in the world who can best judge movies according to that standard and articulate his opinion.  Of course people have different tastes and the conventional view is based on the idea that the web allows segmentation according to taste.  But what if talent in evaluating movies means the ability to judge how people with different tastes would react to different movies?  A review would be a contingent recommendation like “if you like this kind of movie, this is for you.  if you like that kind of movie, then stay away from this one but you might like that one instead.”

In fact, a third effect of the web is to make it easy for experts to find out what different tastes there are out there and how they react to movies.  This tends to increase centralization because it creates a natural monopoly in cataloging tastes and matching tastes to recommendations.  Indeed, Netflix’s marketing strategy is based on this idea and I am lead to hold out Netflix as a counterexample to the conventional view.

Fashion Week: The Bad Plus

Talk about smashing boundaries.  Here is video of that de-trendy trio playing backup music to the Isaac Mizrahi fashion show in New York’s fashion week.  The tune is apparently the new Dave King-penned “Really Good Attitude”  (listen for the hand claps.)  See if you can see any effect on the models’ expressions when the improvisation really goes off the rails.

Here is Ethen Iverson’s account of the event from his great blog Do The Math.

The Bad Plus: For All I Care

The new CD from the 21st-century-defining trio The Bad Plus was released in the US yesterday (for some reason it was available in Europe for a few months now.)  The big news is that they have added a vocalist, Wendy Lewis, and the album is exclusively covers (rumor is that their next album will be all originals, presumably back to the trio.)  The covers are mostly rock-pop tunes in a spirit similar to the covers they have been doing since the beginning, but they have added classical music to the mix, like a Stravinsky that they re-work to sound like very conventional jazz-pop, and something called semi-simple variations.  Partly because these tunes shed the vocals from the other tracks they come closer to the style of music the Bad Plus has been doing succesfully in their previous records.

The recording is not ideal.  To make room for the vocals, the other instruments are mushed into the background.  The drums seem sometimes badly miked and even the piano loses definition at moments where you really want to hear it, especially on the last tune “Feeling Yourself Disintegrate.” On the other hand, the bass stands out beautifully and really sits right in the middle of the music.  In some of its best moments the CD feels like a duet between the bass and the vocals.

Wendy Lewis has a good voice which is ideally suited for many of these tunes, but not all.  The ballads are the weakest because her voice is not always “pretty.”  I am not knocking her here, she is truly a “vocalist” in the sense that she uses her voice as an instrument and she is doing surprisingly well at integrating her instrument into this already dense music.  But in ballads like “Lock Stock and Teardrops” and “Feeling Yourself Disintegrate” nothing complicated is going on and it comes across more like a coffee-house poetry reading than singing.  By contrast and proof that she really has command of different vocal styles, in “How Deep is Your Love” she takes on a sultry, breathy voice which adds a dimension to the music which is missing elsewhere on the album.  Her voice soars over Iverson’s arpeggios in “Comfortably Numb” and she flat out rocks on “Barracuda.”

What is the verdict on this work?  For sure there are many reasons to applaud the Bad Plus for experimenting with vocals and these covers.    In some ways they are being brilliantly opportunistic because pop musicians inexplicably refuse to try and build a canonical repetoire and these great tunes are therefore just sitting there waititng to be reinterpreted for the first time.  If “Long Distance Runaround” was “jazz”, it would be a standard.  Still, I come away disappointed with the CD.  Largely this is because of the recording, but also because with just a few exceptions this doesn’t advance what the Bad Plus is doing, instead it feels more like a side project.

But what’s really important to me is what this CD suggests the live performance is going to be like.  I can imagine that on stage the trio will open up more behind and in between the vocal passages and this could make the whole thing pay off.  We’ll see.