Porres.com – Eric's Humble Place in Cyberspace

As an avid musician and listener to many kinds of music–in particular jazz–I’ve followed Marcus Roberts for a long time, back to my early teens in the 80′s.  Along with an 8 piece band, Marcus Roberts absolutely shot the moon this past weekend, revisiting Deep in the Shed, an album he released in 1990, at The Allen Room in the Time Warner Center.  Deep in the Shed is one of the first jazz CDs I ever owned (CDs were still “new” back in 1990), and is a contender for my list of desert island discs.  An overall favorable review from the NYTimes appears here.  I was lucky to hear them play the last set Saturday night, wherein they kept jamming with two encores, and hardly a performance that I would call “restrained” (per the NYTimes review).  The Allen Room is now also most likely my most favorite place to listen to jazz in New York City, surpassing even the Village Vanguard, my previous favorite location.

I can only hope that someday a recording of the revisitation will be released so that more can be exposed to this amazing musician.  In fact, I’d love to spend an hour with Wynton Marsalis and talk about how an organization like Jazz At Lincoln Center (or any for that matter) could extend the benefits of a live concert to those who attended by offering up that concert for digital consumption.  I would put down money and bet that any and everyone who attended this performance for example would tack on an additional $9.99 to get a digital download of the concert afterwards.  Obviously there would be some limitations, like only online ticket buyers would be eligible in order to track the music back to an email address, etc., but the technical limitations to ‘holding back’ the memory of a live performance no longer exist.

Michiko Kakutani reviews Oliver Sacks’ Musicophilia in today’s NYTimes.  I’ve read so many great reviews on this book and it’s such a deep interest for me that it’s on my holiday wish list both to buy and to read!

“Music has a deep connection to the workings of the brain. In his new book Musicophilia, literary neurologist Oliver Sacks writes about how rhythm and melody can trigger symptoms of neurological disease in some patients and help ease the conditions of others.”

So begins a post at the WSJ’s health blog for an interview with Oliver Sacks about his new book.  This is right on the heels of a recent article in The New Yorker by Sacks about music and amnesia, a touching article about Clive Wearing, an English musician and musicologist who suffers from a devastating case of amnesia and yet can remember how to play music.

I came across the following link to a rare 1954 performance of the virtuoso cellist Pablo Casals playing Bach’s Cello Suite #1.  Absolutely beautiful…and some nice links to other performances by other virtuosi too.

This past weekend I read an article by Haruki Murakami in the NYT about how he became a novelist, and he drew a series of beautiful parallels to music.  I won’t attempt to reproduce his elegance, only point you in the direction of the article here.  But, in that article was a quote from Theloneus Monk that really captures the essence of what piano-playing is all about.  Murakami writes:

One of my all-time favorite jazz pianists is Thelonious Monk. Once, when someone asked him how he managed to get a certain special sound out of the piano, Monk pointed to the keyboard and said: “It can’t be any new note. When you look at the keyboard, all the notes are there already. But if you mean a note enough, it will sound different. You got to pick the notes you really mean!” 

It’s so true, and I will add this to my little mental toolbox of things to think about when playing.

Tom Hespos sent me the following link to a performance then 14-year old Jennifer Lin made at the TED conference in 2004. I dug around and found this link from Yamaha (Jennifer is a Yamaha music student) which provides a bit more detail about the performance and Jennifer’s approach to music. She performed during the conference’s “Sync & Flow” forum along with Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi (who I had the privilege to meet and work with during my time at Disney Educational Publishing). If you are at all familiar with the concept of flow, Lin’s improvisation section of her performance (where she asked a member of the audience to volunteer to pick 5 notes out of 7 in a stack of cards and then improvised a song out of those notes on the spot…Goldie Hawn was the volunteer) is a physical/auditory manifestation of that concept. It is a mesmerizing performance, even when viewed after-the-fact.

In 2006, Lin appeared on Oprah and performed a similar improvisation.

This great article from the NYTimes.com discusses the pros/cons of various forms of bitrate encoding.  As digital storage gets cheaper by the day, music companies are starting to increase the bitrate sampling of songs they make available online (currently for a premium).  Some are even taking Super Audio CD tracks and sampling them at ridiculous rates (one song = 250MB).  From my own experience, as compression gets above 192 kbps, the differential between the original source music and its digital facsimile starts to fade.  Do I still look for SACDs and DVD-As when possible to add to my classical and jazz collection?  Sure!  But for pop/electronica/lounge tunes, etc., increasingly I find myself buying songs online given that the majority of my ‘leisure’ listening experience is through a set of Bang & Olufsen A8 earphones at work.

A new take on Take 5.  Thanks to Hespos for pointing this out.

As some of my friends know, I’ve played piano for a long time. But in all of my studies, never have I seen a cat who plays the piano with two paws. See for yourself.  And the sequel.

Joyce Hatto’s husband has come clean to say that all of her late “recordings” were in fact frauds of his own doing.

Read about it here in this article from the Washington Post.