My Prodigal Ogg Player

Last week I begrudgingly had to send back my shiny new ogg-player for a replacement (you can read more about that story here). To add to the agony, I was out sick yesterday, so when the replacement arrived at the office, I had to sit and pine feverishly (I did have a fever) for it for an extra 24 hours before I could get my grubby hands on the device.

Arriving home with it today however, rather than immediately commence with the music upload, I thought I'd experiment with trying to take one of those fancy product-type shots you see in magazines and such. No time like the present, I convinced myself, before fingerprint-smudges mar the visage. Here's the result:

I knew I wanted a cool blue background, and in lieu of a second flash to slap a blue gel onto, I simply used a blue sheet of card-paper as the base and backdrop. After posing the device appropriately, these are the bits I had to consider regarding how to light it:

• The bottom half of the face needs a specular highlight to emphasize the surface indentations where the buttons are.
• This should transition to no specular highlight in the top half so that the graphics on the display can shine through.
• I need some light as a fill on the right and to emphasize the metallic buttons on the side.
• All this, with just one flash.

Here's the ghetto-setup shot, metered for the flash:


And here it is again, metered for ambient (I opened up the windows to get more light in -- hence the splotchy sunlight).


The guts of it is essentially hooking on that piece of cardboard to the top of the flash as a gobo to produce that light-to-dark transition on the paper which is then reflected in the face of the device. That, and making sure that there's enough shiny stuff at the top and at the right to reflect what little available light makes it through back onto the device for a fill.

Another detail: I was working at a fairly tight aperture, so in order to get the display and button lights to register, I had to use a tripod and keep the shutter open for about a half-second.

Stuff I could've done better?

• Move the specular highlight producing paper further away so the grain of the paper doesn't show up in the reflection. This would've made the fill reflection on the left dimmer though, so it's tough without that second flash.
  

My Fancy New Ogg Player

I've ranted and raved for a while about how the iPod is simply the aesthetically pleasing spawn of the devil, whose sole aim is to rob us of our hard-earned dough for substandard features, and incompatible media formats.

Unfortunately, my trusty iRiver iFP-890 died on me about 2 months ago, and I have not been able to find a replacement. Worse, the pointy-haired fools running that company have gone and sold their souls, and now don't support Ogg files, and only provide a proprietary (Windows Media Player) means of getting music on and off their devices.

So after wandering hither and yon and reading countless technical specifications in Korean, my replacement is here at last! The Cowon iAudio 7. Features that matter to me the most:

• Plays Ogg Vorbis. Even at the insanely high bit-rate (256kbps) that I encode my CDs to.
• Mounts as a standard VFAT filesystem under Linux. And because of this, it hooks nicely into Amarok from which I can drag/drop music, podcasts, etc.
• 8GB of flash memory storage. No spinning hard drives, so I get (supposedly --- I haven't tested) 60 hours of continuous playback time.
• Integrated FM radio.
• Records from integrated mic, line-in, and FM.

The only glitch? I had to return mine for a replacement because (and you're not going to believe this), there was a hair trapped under the screen. Yup. I kid you not. I didn't notice it at first, but when trying out the image-viewing features, I noticed it in stark contrast against one of the brighter pictures. Luckily Amazon has a pretty good policy on replacements, although I'm pretty sure they've never heard a reason like mine before. So Jayita has another week or so before she loses another part of my soul to yet another shiny flashy gadget.

Monk 'n' Trane --- Straight, No Chaser

In early 2005, a recording engineer named Larry Appelbaum discovered a set of 8 acetate-tape reels while mucking about at the Library of Congress, which were labeled "Carnegie Hall Jazz 1957" with a handwritten note hinting "T. Monk" along with some song titles. As it turns out, this was a hitherto unpublished recording by Voice of America of the Monk/Coltrane date at Carnegie Hall.

You see, Monk and Coltrane worked together for a very brief period --- just over a year (April 1957 to September 1958) --- and while they performed together extensively during that time, there is a devastating paucity of recorded evidence of their work, which made Appelbaum's excavations all the more stunning.

Monk would've turned 90 this year, and as part of what they're calling the Monk Project, SFJazz's Spring Season yesterday featured a reimagining of that historic Carnegie Hall concert with Joshua Redman, Brad Mehldau, Christian McBride and Brian Blade taking on the mantles of John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Ahmed Abdul-Malik and Shadow Wilson respectively.

When signing up for the tickets earlier this year, I was initially a little skeptical of attending one of those reenactment concerts which usually feature too much replication and very little imagination. I'm glad I ignored those initial anxieties. While they stuck closely to the original set list with a lot of Monk's standards like "Crepuscule with Nellie" and "Monk's Mood", this was truly a "reimagination". Blade and Redman were particularly inspired, while Mehldau anchored the quartet in Monk's trademark harmonic eccentricities. I was a tad disappointed in McBride's showing --- he tended to play in a detached sort of way, which was unlike the previous times I've seen him as a bandleader.

For cute irony, they rounded off the night with an encore performance of Straight, No Chaser. Awesome! :)

You know, anybody can play a composition and use far-out chords and make it sound wrong. It's making it sound right that's not easy.

--Thelonious Sphere Monk

Avishai Cohen @ Yoshi's

Peter and I caught Avishai Cohen's trio at Yoshi's last night. Normally, when it comes to attending live shows, I'm somewhat risk-averse, and tend to go with musicians of whose music I've already heard (and liked) a significant chunk. In that sense, this show departed from that ethic, since I've only ever heard his playing on one album --- the Chick Corea New Trio's Past, Present and Futures.

My leap of faith wasn't misplaced. While his band isn't as tight as some of the other acts that I've gotten used to seeing (like the SFJazz Collective), the energy that pours out of these young guys is astounding, and made for quite an exhilarating evening. Both Peter and I are convinced we should attend more of these when we can.

Btw, the setlist was primarily from his As Is... Live At The Blue Note album. Sidemen on this date: Shai Maestro (piano), Mark Guilliana (drums).

Ladies Six-String

Two nights ago, Jayita and I caught Patty Larkin at The Attic. As expected, a fantastic performance, but the best thing I got out of the evening was a CD I picked up that she produced a few years ago called La Guitara. It contains some amazing pieces by some of the best and most influential female guitarists around including Kaki King, Vicki Genfan, and Badi Assad.

A brief search on YouTube brought up the following snippet (among others) of Kaki King's astounding percussive technique:

And while her sound is really cool and funky, Vicki Genfan has the ability to take that to the next level and get some seriously rich, sustained bell-like sounds out of her tapping. I find her style to produce a much more mature, disciplined sound.

My music shopping list just got a lot longer.

Bassically...

It's turned out to be the season of The Bass.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, Stanley Clarke kicked some serious (b)ass over at Yoshi's last month. It turns out that San Francisco is practically seething with bass-masters this Spring. On Saturday, Peter and I caught the legendary bassist Ron Carter's quartet. This was probably the most polished act since The Modern Jazz Quartet --- they even wore matching ties! Attire aside, I haven't seen a musically tighter group in a long time.

In two weeks we'll have Avishai Cohen in town. The first time I heard this guy was on Chick Corea's Fingerprints (off the Past, Present and Futures album) where his bass lines simply astounded. Other than samples off his website, I've heard very little of his own music, but the fact that he blends some Middle Eastern motifs into his work intrigues.

On a smoother-jazz note, Richard Bona will also be at Yoshi's next month. I quite enjoy his music for light listening, and Jayita's a fan too since he plays the kind of jazz that doesn't make her "tense". I've caught him in concert once back at USC, back in the days when the Fall jazz festival organized by Spectrum actually had some really awesome artists perform, and he could pluck a pretty pleasant string. As a side-benefit, he has an ethereal voice.

Here's to the low notes...

New ER-6i Isolator Earphones

Here's the nub. I love listening to jazz while working. So picture me at my desk at Google, happily hacking away, and listening to Ornette Coleman (for example). Now picture a pair of spectacles surrounded by anguished features goggling at me from across my office. Multiply spectacles and anguished map by three, and you'll have an idea of what would come to pass were I inconsiderate enough to do this without personalizing the aural experience.

Hence, I've been on the lookout for a good pair of headphones for a while now. I considered the Bose noise-canceling variety that are hawked at every airport these days, but I couldn't stand the size. And my earlobes feel sore if I have stuff pressed against them for too long. True, I could use the button-headphones that come with most mp3 players, but you need superglue to keep them in place while running at the gym.

I finally found everything I was looking for in these. Awesome frequency response for the size, and the in-ear design meant that they would be locked in place and provide about 35dB of noise reduction pretty much across the spectrum.

The near (officemates) and dear (ball and c.) now can rest easy in the comforting thought that I won't be inflicting any jazz goodness on them. Poor blighters.

Jazz and the Other Woman

It's been a while since we gave Eric some guilt; both about not graduating, and about his wild-and-wondrous life. And missing us as much as we missed him, up to the Bay Area he came for another weekend of sake and song.

On Saturday we caught Stanley Clarke at Yoshi's. Stunning performance from the reigning master of the electric bass. As a bonus, towards the end of the evening he even did a couple of numbers on the upright bass, finishing off with a mindbending encore performance of the piece Touch from his latest album 1, 2, To The Bass.

Sunday was reserved for the SFJazz Collective's study of the legendary Thelonious Monk. I was initially a little anxious about the replacement of Nicholas Payton with Dave Douglas, but this diminutive New Jersey horn player showed some seriously larger-than-life chops. And although the name of the piece escapes me, Miguel Zenón's arrangement of one of Monk's tunes was one of the best of the night. Watch this guy's career with considerable interest. He has consistently produced some of the most stimulating music in jazz in the last 2 years.

Moodbar

This was a weekend of tinkering. One of the things I discovered was Moodbar --- a cute blend of signal-processing and UI design. The motivation for this toy was that intra-song navigation is still largely guesswork since one has to know in minutes/seconds where one would like to jump to in a song. Now why would you want to jump around a song? Well, if you're like me, you might want to jump to an interesting few bars of a musician's solo, for example. So rather than dealing with this antiquated interface:

this is what I can work with instead:

I'll point you to their paper for all the interesting details, but the gist of it is that for each few-millisecond slice of the song, the intensity of the power spectrum in the low, mid and high ranges is translated into R, G and B values respectively. What this means for those of you (yes you Jayita) who've forgotten signal-processing basics, bright shades mean loud bits, red parts denote bass-dominated parts of the song, while green and blue indicate more stuff in the soprano and higher regions. Here's what a few of my favorites look like:

"2 and 2" has 3 distinct regions corresponding to solos by Miguel Zenon (soprano sax), Joshua Redman (alto sax), and Eric Harland (drums). The horn solos are green, indicating a strong mid-range response, while Eric's solo is a mixture of bass (red) and high-frequency (blue) cymbal-work. It's also interesting to see the pattern of tension buildup and release in each solo; the colors start out dark, and build up to a bright glow towards the end of each solo (a common idiom in jazz).

Dream Theater's "Caught In A Web" has nice green highlights where James LaBrie's voice dominates the midrange. Now I know how to jump around those bits since I think he's typically the weakest element of the band's music (sorry Arjun!).

Surprisingly, jazz tends to display more structure in the moodbars --- probably because of the long solo sections featuring instruments in different tonal ranges. Bill Evan's "All of You" shows nice demarcations with Scott LaFaro's bass solo taking up the dark-red section in the middle followed by a short solo by Paul Motian on drums. Joe Henderson's blistering saxophone solo also shows up in bright green on McCoy Tyner's "Passion Dance".

Pop and rock moodbars are less organized, but song structure such as choruses (such as the bright loud cyan regions where "We Will Rock You" is yelled by the crowd) are easily identifiable too.

I should mention that the moodbar is available as a plugin to Amarok.

"Show" Off

That's what I'm going to do.

In the last 3 weeks I've attended five (yessiree!) shows (I love the Bay Area). First was Bobby McFerrin. Now saying that this man has an amazing voice is akin to saying that Beethoven's Fifth is a pleasant little ditty. He performed with Voicestra, an 11-member a capella group which had an interesting improvisational style for a choir: Separating them into the traditional platoons of bass, tenor, alto and soprano, Bobby would start a purely improvisational groove and get one section to follow, while leading off and improvising a melodically distinct groove with another section which wove seamlessly into the previous ones.

Knowing that I'd missed watching Ladysmith Black Mambazo perform in each of the previous two years that we've lived in the Bay Area, Jayita had made sure we didn't do the same for their appearance at Stanford this year. As expected, these jewels of South Africa were stunning. The tightness of their vocal harmonies are unmatched, even if the melodies got somewhat wearisome over the course of the evening.

A few days later, I was driving back up to Berkeley to catch Paco de Lucia and his group of flamenco musicians and singers. A true luminary of the flamenco guitar, he impressed us most with how easy he made it look. For me, an eye-opener was the performance given by the two female flamenco singers. I'd never heard a singing style like that ever. I'm definitely going to try to acquire some of that music.

Three days later, we were back in Berkeley for Kodo; a Japanese taiko drumming troup. The sheer visual spectacle of this art form can't be missed. The incredible physical endurance displayed by some of the performers, as well as the virtuosity in improvised rhythms made it an evening to remember. They performed on several different types of drums from the smaller rope-tightened ones, to the large o-daiko, measuring four feet across and carved from a single tree trunk. The piece composed for this beast was supposedly inspired by the sound of a mother's heartbeat as heard by a baby in the womb.

Final trip to Berkeley for the month: Wait, Wait... Don't Tell Me!, one of our favorite NPR shows was being recorded live at Zellerbach, so yesterday we toodled back across the bay. What's truly amazing is how much of the show doesn't make it to air. Between Paula Poundstone making repeated references to the phrase "crap a pineapple", just to see how the sign-language interpreters would translate, and Linda Ronstadt (the special guest) discussing the absolute uselessness of the brassiere, we rolled in the aisles.

Good times.

Erik Mongrain

Arjun pointed me at a YouTube link a few days ago that I couldn't view since I didn't have sound enabled on the machine I was at. I saw it today, and was just floored. Here's another one by the same guy:

Conversations

In classical music, the written composition is something like a play. Each actor has a written part which is followed exactly, and the performance is measured by how well the actors breathe life into each role. In jazz however, a composition is more like the topic of a conversation in which the performers are invited to participate. They are free (and indeed encouraged) to present novel and interesting ideas within the framework of this topic (As an interesting aside; Indian classical music is a more rigorous treatment of this conversational philosophy). And just as in any conversation, a jazz performance is measured by how interesting each participant's ideas are, and their interplay.

This is why it's so great to see a jazz standard performed by different collections of musicians (or even by the same collection in a different setting). Each session is a meeting of minds -- learning, collaborating, exchanging and innovating. Old friends revel in knowing and anticipating each other's conversational style, and new meetings provide exciting fresh perspectives on tried-and-true lines, inspiring even further innovation.

This is also an interesting analogy within which to explore why some people like certain (performances of) compositions and not others. Think back to the last social gathering in which you participated in (or listened in on) a group conversation. If a conversation leaves you out of your depth because the ideas are too complex, then you tend to tune out. Similarly, if the conversation is mere drivel, it quickly becomes irritating and boring. A conversation which is a complete barrage of new ideas is exhausting, while one that merely repeats well-known phrases sounds cliche. Even so, it's important to realize that novelty is in the ear of the beholder, and each listener is a collective set of experiences that give new events and ideas their context.

Just as listenening or participating in a social conversation needs a requisite intellectual substrate, listening to jazz demands the corresponding collective musical experience within which we can understand the melodic discussions that evolve. Therefore, not just performing, but even listenening to jazz is a practiced art which takes time and training. If pursued however, it enables one to decrypt this secret world of conversations where the ideas can be refreshing, thoughtful, emotive, and always infectious.

Tags: jazz, music

Making Music

I finally have a piano (again)!

Susan Pinto, a former piano teacher of mine once said to me reproachfully over her bifocals: "If you don't practice for a day, you'll notice the difference. If you don't practice for two days, your fellow performers will notice the difference. Don't practice for three days and your audience will notice the difference."

I haven't practiced in six years. Oboy.

Three cheers for C. L. Hanon!