Jazz and Tropicália

Spent the weekend in San Francisco to attend three San Francisco Jazz festival concerts and otherwise enjoy the city. The three concerts were all over the place, in a very good way. Friday night we heard the Portuguese/Cabo Verde singer/songwriter Sara Tavares with a strong quartet from Cabo Verde and Portugal. She was suffering from a respiratory ailment (she said flu but I have difficulty in believing that she would have been able to perform at all with the flu) and the first few songs lacked energy somewhat. She got stronger through the set, however. She did a great Balancé, one of her best-known songs, and she generally showed a stylistic freedom and disregard for the bonds of Portuguese song convention that were very refreshing. Not a perfect performance, besides her illness they had equipment glitches, but lots there to like and a great rapport between Sara and her band.

On Saturday we saw Savion Glover and his outstanding band. Wow. Edge of the seat work, like with Gonzalo Rubalcaba the other day. Except that one can get a whiff of Rubalcaba on recordings, while Glover has to be seen. Glover's dialog and debate with his band members (all amazing, but Tommy James on piano and Patience Higgins on saxophones had especially rich interactions with Glover), the depth of rhythmic variation around Coltrane and blues themes, were breathtaking, so intense and surprising that one truly forgot to inhale, with not a second of slack.

Today, we heard John Arbercrombie with Mark Feldman (violin), Drew Gress (bass) and Anthony Pinciotti (drums). Abercrombie and Feldman are the core of several of my favorite recordings of the last several years: Open Land, Can 'n' Mouse, Class Trip, and The Third Quartet. Today's set was mostly compositions from Wait Till You See Her, a new record I didn't know. I had heard Abercrombie live only once before, with Larry Coryell and Badi Assad on the live tour of Tree Guitars. In today's set he and his partners, especially Feldman, did what we really hope for in live jazz, going outside the tighter confines of a studio recording to wander, explore, tease and draw the audience.

In between, we enjoyed a beautiful cool fall weekend walking around San Francisco, and a delightfully varied exhibition of modern Brazilian art at the Yerba Buena Arts Center.

Pay Powder

Pay Powder: How much would you pay to ski fresh powder? Does it even have a price? Squaw valley seems to think so. Squaw is built on private rather than forestry service land with limited access to the backcountry. That is set to change as it re-jigs lift pass prices in light of the credit crunch. [...] The resort has always strictly controlled access to the out-bounds terrain including the National Geographic bowl, at least if you are a Squaw paying customer. For that you will need to purchase the eye-wateringly expensive platinum pass at $1699. This enrolls you in the “out of bounds program”. (Via PisteHors)

The sky is not falling. Squaw's program is intended for well-off pass holders for whom the extra cost of a platinum pass compares well with the cost of a day of heliskiing. Nothing obliges Squaw to offer convenient lift access to the backcountry for free. Since Squaw has always forbidden backcountry access from its lifts, nothing has materially changed for the worse with this new offer. Except maybe for the green-with-envy feelings it creates on those confined to inbounds tracked out turns while the high-living are taken on fresh tracks just over the boundary rope. If you can't stand the wave of envy, there's nice Sugar Bowl just a few miles NW as the crow flies who allow easy backcountry access from their lifts. And there's always skinning for your turns from a multitude of trailheads around the Tahoe basin.

An open letter to Steve Levitt

An open letter to Steve Levitt: [...]The point here is that really simple arithmetic, which you could not be bothered to do, would have been enough to tell you that the claim that the blackness of solar cells makes solar energy pointless is complete and utter nonsense. I don’t think you would have accepted such laziness and sloppiness in a term paper from one of your students, so why do you accept it from yourself? What does the failure to do such basic thinking with numbers say about the extent to which anything you write can be trusted? How do you think it reflects on the profession of economics when a member of that profession — somebody who that profession seems to esteem highly — publicly and noisily shows that he cannot be bothered to do simple arithmetic and elementary background reading. Not even for a subject of such paramount importance as global warming. (Via Real Climate)

Priceless.

AlpControl claims world’s lightest wide skis

AlpControl claims world’s lightest wide skis: AlpControl claims its new carbon fiber skis weigh under 2000 grams (4.3lbs) a pair in 175cm with a shovel of 120mm. That’s less than some of the skinny competition skis used the the Pierra Menta competition. However it is ultra durable, the manufacturer claims it might be the best investment in your skiing life.

(Via PisteHors)

But how will it ski? All that elasticity could make for an interesting ride on hard snow.

Gonzalo Rubalcaba Quintet

I can't get words together. I was at the edge of my seat for much of almost two hours of music that was both unpredictable before it happened and the only way it could be afterwards. I think of the most memorable mathematical proofs, of Braque, Delauney, Pollock; Stravinsky. Deeply thought-out construction that yet feels spontaneous, alive, constantly evolving under its own dynamics. Clusters of notes bouncing among players to the point that one can't figure out what is coming from which instrument, and yet supreme clarity. Again with the mathematics simile, that feeling of vertigo when a inscrutable build-up of argument opens up into the revelation of a final step that makes everything make sense. Or as after ascending a steep snowy slope for hours, the other peaks start poking over the looming ridge, light spreads, and the horizon finally falls away to an infinite variety of landscape.

We've been lucky with several very good jazz outings over the last year, but this one was on a different (hyper)plane. Rubalcaba's virtuosity on the piano was never gratuitous, and rebounded off an incredibly skilled ensemble. Ernesto Simpson with a crisp, airy command of the drums and Yunior Terry with an insistent deep rumble on the bass spread out the piano's rhythmic sparks into space-filling creations (that Pollock idea). Alex Sipiagin on trumpet started maybe a bit tentative, but for the rest of the set and encores he grew and grew with urgent calls, oompah humor, almost painful buildups, longing. Yosvany Terry on alto and tenor sax was the hub of the ensemble, picking up ideas from the piano that spread through the ensemble, and reacting to them with discoveries and surprises now funny, now scary, spinning wheels of notes (that Delauney idea). When hints of a standard were brought in, it was never in the sometimes lazy way in which other bands take a break from hard work by indulging the audience's recognition. Instead, it became quickly transformed into something else, stretched, bent, rebuilt; in another mathematical (or Pollock) analogy, like a chaotic dynamics breaks up an initially compact region into a shifting flock of points.

One sad aspect of the concert is that the audience was middle-aged or older. I know that tickets are very expensive. But also, music like this is about individual engagement between the band and each serious listener, not about creating a framework for social interaction within the audience for an overwhelmingly social youth culture.

Music season starts

More musical events on my calendar the next couple of months than anytime since the legendary Gulbenkian Foundation festivals in Lisbon in the late 60s-early 70s. Coming week:

• Oct 21: Anonymous 4
• Oct 23: Gonzalo Rubalcaba

Farhad Manjoo on Google Wave’s Complexity

Farhad Manjoo on Google Wave’s Complexity: On Wave, every misspelling, half-formed sentence, and ill-advised stab at sarcasm is transmitted instantly to the other person. This behavior is so corrosive to normal conversation that you'd think it was some kind of bug. (Via Daring Fireball)

This is the silliest claim about human communication I've read in a long time. As a writer, Manjoo may be uncomfortable letting others see his communicative sausage being made. But before teletypes and their successors, "normal conversation" — face-to-face conversation — was — still is — all hesitations, false starts, disfluencies, failed attempts at humor, misheard words, losses of attention. That's what we are, that's how we work. We perceive, interpret, and think as we talk, and a lot of that is trial and error.

Manjoo complains that instant transmission of typed characters makes the typist "self conscious." Translation: I'm used to hiding what/how I'm really thinking when I communicate online, and I feel uncomfortable coming out from behind the curtain.

Answer to comments: What Manjoo wrote was at best a unwarranted generalization from his personal reaction to the feature. He made an empirically false claim about human communication; even it the claim is charitably interpreted to be only about typed communication, he cited no empirical evidence about the alleged corrosiveness. Why did he feel the need to make a sweeping generalization, instead of honestly reporting his own experience, and that of others he interviewed, and let us draw own own inferences? The disease of the current 24-hour punditry cycle is an escalation of instant assertion unsupported by evidence to demonstrate the pundit's manhood (how's that for a sweeping generalization?)

Much before the BSD talk program, there was the TENEX talk command that had the same character-at-a-time behavior and may have been the first such program I used. Personally, I didn't feel it corroded my ability to communicate, but I won't turn that into a general claim. I was using Wave editing a document a collaborator recently, and the immediate feedback was useful to what we were doing, especially the marker that showed where he was editing.