This Week: They Were Collaborators

This article is cross-posted from the Miles to Go Before I Sleep blog...


This week's theme on Miles to Go Before I Sleep: "They Were Collaborators," so I made sure to lay down the tracks featuring partnerships from some of the best jazz cats and blues-hounds, known and unknown, around (such as two of the greatest, Davis and Coltrane, pictured, in the studio, on the right). And, as if that weren't enough, Miles to Go enjoyed a visit from the beautiful and talented Lili Martinez. Thanks again to all of those who listened in, and for your comments and requests. Here's the rundown for all of you who may have missed it, or want a reminder of I what I played tonight:

1. San Francisco Scene (The Beat Generation) - Jack Keroauc & Tom Waits
2. Pent-Up House  - Clifford Brown & Sonny Rollins
3. Big Nick - Duke Ellington & John Coltrane
4. Afternoon in Paris - Sonny Rollins & Dave Brubeck
5. St. James' Infirmary - Eric Clapton & Dr. John
6. Help the Poor - Doc Dalton & The Healing
7. Worried Life Blues - Eric Clapton & BB King
8. Summertime - Ella Fitzgerald & Louis Armstrong
9. Misty - Stan Getz & Dave Brubeck
10. Moten Swing - The Oscar Peterson Trio
11. So What [Live] - Miles Davis & John Coltrane
12. Mood Indigo - Duke Ellington & Coleman Hawkins
13. In a Sentimental Mood - John Coltrane, Miles Davis, & Duke Ellington
14. Corcavado (Quiet Nights of Quiet Stars) - Stan Getz & João Gilberto
15. See You Space Cowboy... - Mai Yamane w/ Yoko Kanno & The SeatBelts
16. Off Minor - Thelonious Monk & John Coltrane
17. On the Sunny Side of the Street - Dizzy Gillespie, Sonny Stitt, & Sonny Rollins
18. In Case the World Changes Its Mind - Medeski, Martin & Wood feat. John Scofield
19. Three O'Clock Blues - Eric Clapton & BB King
20. 'Round Midnight - Miles Davis & Sonny Rollins

Talk-over music came courtesy of Medeski, Martin & Wood, Mulatu Astatke, The Swingle Sisters, and Yoko Kanno & The SeatBelts.

For a rundown of the Miles to Go playlist each week, keep your browsers here, and for the best jazz et al. around, keep your radios (or your iTunes) tuned to WKCO 91.9 FM!

This Week: What we're all about...

This article is cross-posted from the Miles to Go Before I Sleep blog...

Welcome, all you gone cats and hep kittens, to the companion blog for Miles to Go Before I Sleep on WKCO! If you tuned in for our premiere episode this evening, thanks for listening and calling/writing in with many great requests! If not, I suppose I can forgive you, but you don't know what you're missing. That said, here's a look at what I spun tonight:

1. Midnight Lullaby - Tom Waits
2. Chubb Sub - Medeski, Martin & Wood
3. Take Five [Live from Carnegie Hall] - The Dave Brubeck Quartet
4. Emily - Bill Evans
5. Use Me - Bill Withers
6. Summertime - Miles Davis
7. Bye Bye Blackbird - Miles Davis and Sonny Rollins
8. Everybody Wants to Rule the World - The Bad Plus
9. Changes - Seu Jorge
10. Light My Fire [Live from the Blue Note] - Paris Troika
11. II BS - Charles Mingus
12. Baby Grand - Billy Joel feat. Ray Charles
13. Cantina Band - John Williams
14. Summertime/Burma Shave [Live from Austin City Limits] - Tom Waits
15. Yègellé Tezeta - Mulatu Astatke
16. KC Blues - Charlie Parker
17. Farewell Blues - The New York Musicians
18. Breakin' the Chains of Love - Fitz & The Tantrums
19. Saturday Night Church - Tuatura
20. Hell - Squirrel Nut Zippers
21. Nutville - Buddy Rich
22. Blue in Green - Miles Davis

Talk-over music came tonight from Air; Booker T. and the MG's; Medeski, Martin & Wood; Mulatu Astatke; and Yoko Kanno & The Seat Belts. 

For a rundown of the Miles to Go playlist each week, keep your browsers here, and for the best jazz et al. around, keep your radios (or your iTunes) tuned to WKCO 91.9 FM!

An Equation: Bass + Pianoforte + Spaghetti Western = Speechless

I know that it has been months since I've written on this blog, and for that I apologize. I promise I'll get back to it soon, as there is much updating to do. But, as part of my penance, I offer this most excellent video from Diego Stocco, modern composer and musician, and the creator of the Bassoforte. What is the Bassoforte, you ask?

"Few days ago I started thinking about how I could re-purpose the keyboard of the dismantled piano I keep in the garden, so I thought to build a new instrument by combining it with some other parts I had laying around. I ended up with this mechanical hybrid thing I thought to call "Bassoforte" (bass + pianoforte).

The neck is from a broken electric bass, as a bridge I used a cabinet handle, the pickups are from a guitar, and the part at the top where the strings are attached is a chimney cap, which works as resonator as well as percussive sound.

The track I created is a tribute to my Dad who is a big fan of Western comic books and "spaghetti western" films, and because of him I am too."

Inventiveness, a phat beat, and a Father's Day tribute? I dig.


Diego Stocco - Bassoforte from Diego Stocco on Vimeo.

Another Lazy Sunday: Round Three (The Andy Kaufman Edition)

My first exposure to Andy Kaufman came in late-night TV Land re-runs of Taxi, a show which featured Kaufman as Latka Gravas, a mechanic for the Sunshine Cab Company.  I was maybe eight years old when I first saw Taxi, and I'm sure I didn't get it half of the time. But, even then I knew there was something pretty funny about it.

Now, I haven't seen Taxi in years. I'm sure there are still re-runs floating around somewhere, but I wouldn't know where to start looking for them. However, I do have YouTube, and for some reason Andy Kaufman came to mind the other day. So I started browsing around for some videos of his stand-up routine. So, I present to you a few videos of Andy Kaufman, some as his "Foreign Man" character (the proto-Latka) one video of Kaufman as alter-ego Tony Clifton (the footage - from The Dinah Shore Show - is a bit rough), as well as a bit of Kaufman himself with Merv Griffin and Steve Martin, respectively. Tenk you vedy much!

In today's blog post: Who is Ira Glass? And where is that missing child?!

Well, it's very, very long overdue, but I'm proud to say that two of the mysteries presented on this blog have been resolved! (This post is one part fulfilled expectations, one part crack investigative journalism. Yes, I will gladly accept my Pulitzer nomination...)

I've received word back from two of my "outstanding" e-mails: that requesting an interview with This American Life's Ira Glass, and that inquiring about the missing child (video) on Today's Big Thing. Rather than summarize, I'll transcribe the e-mails here:

From Emily Condon (Office Manager, This American Life)
Hi Daniel,

Thanks for your very nice email. It’s always touching to hear from people who’ve been so influenced by This American Life (and I’m happy to know that the educators of America are doing their part to get the show out there!)

Here’s the thing about interviews: Ira gets so many requests like this that if we fulfilled all of them, or really almost any of them, we’d never get a radio show produced. And it doesn’t seem fair or really even possible to arbitrarily pick and choose. So we’re forced to say no to them unless they’re directly tied to something very particular that we’re doing or occasionally if it’s for a pledge drive for a station TAL airs on or something. So I’m afraid that this isn’t possible given his current schedule. However – I will keep your email and if something changes or his schedule frees up I will let you know.

I do have one suggestion that I think you might find helpful: Ira published a kind of radio manifesto on transom.org a while back that functions as pretty much exactly what you’re asking for - advice and thoughts about navigating the world of radio and so forth. If you go to www.transom.org and type his name into the search engine, it will come up. I think you might find it really helpful.

Hope that helps, and thanks for listening!

All best,
Emily

Not the answer I was hoping for, but the answer I was expecting. I was impressed, though, with just how polite she was about the whole thing. And though it has taken me quite some time to follow up about this e-mail on this blog, she actually got back to me very quickly. Most impressive.

From Kevin (On behalf of Today's Big Thing)

Hi Daniel,

The creators of the video decided they weren't comfortable with how popular the video was becoming and asked us to remove it. Sorry.

Kevin

Short and sweet. And I guess that makes sense. It's one thing to take down a sensitive video because of complaints about its controversial content - which I was sure was going to be the culprit, in this case. However, I can certainly understand not wanting a video of your seven-or-eight-year-old nephew/cousin becoming the latest Internet meme. I respect that.

[insert false statement here, only to be refuted in the post's first line, since it's April Fool's day]

Just kidding! I would never [false statement]. I can't believe you fell for that! (Hardy-har-har.)

It has been far too long since I've written, and I do intend to properly update this blog sometime in the near future - that's what the weekend is for, right? But because it is April Fool's Day, I thought I'd share a few great April 1st pranks from around the Cloud. (Hey, maybe we'll look at this as an "Another Lazy...Thursday Evening" post? Does that make up for my absence?) Since I am, by all accounts, addicted to Google - how true it is - I will start there:

Google, Kansas? Topeka Search?: Perhaps you haven't heard that Topeka, Kansas has decided to change its name to Google, Kansas for a month in hopes that Google will choose them to be a part of their new high-speed internet network. But today, it seems that Google was so flattered they decided to return the favor (see picture above). According to the Official Google Blog:

We didn’t reach this decision lightly; after all, we had a fair amount of brand equity tied up in our old name. But the more we surfed around (the former) Topeka’s municipal website, the more kinship we felt with this fine city at the edge of the Great Plains.

Of course, this is not the first time Google has played a prank like this - and, as evinced by the few entries to follow, it won't be the last - which has included Google Gulp (Google's new energy drink), Google Romance (search for true love), or CADIE (The Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity), a computer program capable of learning and interacting intelligently with other beings. This year's list continues:

Google Translate for Animals: Perhaps you've used Google Translate before when you've been in a linguistic pinch - I know it helped me when my uncle switched his Chrome's default language to Italian - but Google has gone and taken it a step further. You can now use your Android-enabled phone to record and analyze what animals are saying to you - we've needed a technology like this for years!

Watch YouTube videos in TextP: And if you ventured onto YouTube today, you would've had the opportunity to view videos in a "TextP" format (similar to the one shown here). What's fascinating is that, apparently, showing videos in this format saves them $1.00 a second in bandwidth cost per viewer. Nuts, right?

And now, for a non-Google contributor...

ThinkGeek's Dharma Initiative Alarm Clock: I've recently become obsessed with Lost, so when I saw this YouTube video from ThinkGeek for a Dharma Initiative Alarm Clock, I nearly lost it (no pun intended). Seriously, though, punching in a code in place of a snooze button? Brilliant.

Honestly, Google should be paying me...

...for the enthusiastic PR that I've been doling out to them lately.

I've already briefly outlined my thing for all things Google: YouTube. G-mail. Google Calendar. Google Chrome. Google Bread. Google Water. Et cetera. But in the last week or so, I've discovered a few more Google services that are changing the way I operate on a day-to-day basis: Google Reader and Google Voice. (As it is very late and my linguistic and artistic sensibilities are dwindling, I will speak only briefly about each. Who knows? I may be writing more in the near future...)

Google Reader
At the risk of sounding like a late-night infomercial: If you're anything like me, part of your daily routine consists of jumping from website to website, getting your news here, your daily dose of humor there, your interesting tidbits from every-which way. Because there are so many of them, it was hard for me to remember what I have or haven't read, and for that reason, I only followed a few sites and blogs religiously. But then I stumbled onto Google Reader. I've included a YouTube video below that explains it quite well, but by way of introduction, imagine that each day, a custom-designed newspaper was delivered to your doorstep, containing all the content that you wanted and none that you didn't. It would even give you suggestions for content that you didn't realize you wanted to read. Well, that's Google Reader.



Google Voice
Google Reader is great, and it's already changed the way I use the Internet on a day-to-day basis. But this is what I'm most excited about, at the moment: Google Voice. If you could ask the people closest to me in life what I've been raving about for the past 24 hours or so, it's this. In lieu of me writing page-after-page about why I'm so excited to start using Google Voice, here's a clip:



Fair warning: Google Voice - like G-mail was in its beta phase - is currently invite-only, and these invites aren't easy to come by. You can request one from Google, but it may take time. So, if you're as excited to check out Google Voice as I am - I just got my invite, so I'll be looking into a bit more in the days to come - request early and often, and hone your patience...it may be quite a wait.

Another Lazy Sunday: Round Two

It's Sunday. It's Pi Day. It's Daylight Savings Weekend. And it's still Spring Break, the beginning of week two. I've been able to keep myself occupied, for the most part. Thank God for Google Reader, which has kept me both organized and entertained when I was not running around doing this or that. And, in the process of relieving my occasional boredom, I've discovered a few things that are worth passing on. So, as the second installment of my Another Lazy Sunday series, I present:

1) Daylight Savings...Dangerous?

Seeing as how we're all feeling the effects of losing one hour's sleep, I thought this would be an appropriate place to start. A recent report from journal Sleep Medicine suggests that there is a correlation between the loss of an hour due to Daylight Savings Time and the number of auto accidents that occur the following Monday. On the flip side, it seems there is also a spike in auto accidents in the fall, when DST ends. The study concludes:

"The sleep deprivation on the Monday following shift to DST in the spring results in a small increase in fatal accidents. The behavioral adaptation anticipating the longer day on Sunday of the shift from DST in the fall leads to an increased number of accidents suggesting an increase in late night (early Sunday morning) driving when traffic related fatalities are high possibly related to alcohol consumption and driving while sleepy. Public health educators should probably consider issuing warnings both about the effects of sleep loss in the spring shift and possible behaviors such as staying out later, particularly when consuming alcohol in the fall shift. Sleep clinicians should be aware that health consequences from forced changes in the circadian patterns resulting from DST come not only from physiological adjustments but also from behavioral responses to forced circadian changes."

2) Seven Celebrities Who Had Careers You Didn't Know About

If you're not familiar with Cracked.com, here's the premise: Once a day, they post an article or two that lists people, events, etc. on a particular theme. There are articles on Pop Culture (6 Insane Fan Theories That Actually Make Great Movies Better), Science & Technology (6 Things Your Body Does Everyday (That Can Destroy You)), History (9 Inventions that Prove Leonardo da Vinci was a Supervillain), et cetera. Granted, they're all pretty ridiculous, but they are always grounded in fact. In any case, one of their most recent - and interesting articles - looks at seven celebrities that were, perhaps, known for the wrong accomplishments. For instance: Chevy Chase was the drummer for what would become Steely Dan, Dr. Seuss was an Academy Award winner for a war film, Sir Isaac Newton invented the doggy door, and the man who voiced Tigger invented the artificial heart. Check it out...you might learn something.

3) The Devil, Zombies, and The Devil

Stephen Riddle is the blogger/film critic responsible for You'd Be Surprised What An Old Man Remembers - and he happens to be a friend of mine. On his blog, Riddle offers critique of recently released films, gives his take on the classics, and recommends many films which (at least, in my case) one might not have heard about otherwise. The last of these recently gave me some viewing homework for the past weekend.

In the article linked above, Riddle looks at the horror movies 2009 had to offer, most of which were complete garbage. He suggested, instead, three independent horror films worth a few hours of one's time. Over the course of three days, I watched each of the three films: The House of the Devil, Pontypool, and Triangle. All were great films, but I most enjoyed Pontypool - it's set in a radio station, and would make a great straight play - and Triangle - the movie left me reeling, but I sure enjoyed getting the headache that resulted; so much, in fact, that I watched it again right away...which, if you watch the movie, you will realize is made even more creepy by the subject matter.

4) Tell us how the Republicans really feel, won't you?

Normally I would only offer three items on a Lazy Sunday - otherwise, I would just be working too much, right? But how on Earth could I pass this up? Besides, this one pretty much speaks for itself:

Curiosities in the Digital Universe: Round I, Part 2

[The photo below is, of course, not the missing video in question, but proof that it once existed. I'm not crazy!]

For those of you who follow this blog faithfully - which, I figure, is next to no-one - you may notice that one of the videos from my last post has turned up missing. That particular video, entitled "Adorable Child Accepts Gay Marriage," featured a boy - probably seven or eight years old - at a Thanksgiving get-together, talking to an older uncle or cousin about the fact that he was married to another man. In the video, he says something to the effect of: "I've heard of husbands and wives before, but never husbands and husbands," and "well, then you two are in love?" With little difficulty, the tike says "Okay...I'm going to go play ping-pong, but you can come if you want." It is, of course, hard to describe, but the video was funny and heart-warming, and had something important to say about gay rights and the acceptance of gay couples.

When I returned to my blog today, I noticed that the above-described video had been replaced by a different one, of a frustrated reporter out in the field. I followed the link to website where I found it, Today's Big Thing, to find that it was gone. I looked back through the days preceding to make sure I hadn't missed it.   searched the website's archives. It was gone, nowhere to be found. I thought that I would replace the embedded video on my blog with another link from another site. It turns out that the video had been removed not only from Today's Big Thing, but from College Humor (where the video originated) and YouTube. I Googled it further, and found several websites - StumbleUpon, vodpod, BoingBoing, etc. - which claimed to have it. Of course, because the video's source was removed, they did not. In two day's time, the video disappeared completely from the Interweb.

Now, what I want to know is this: What's happened to the adorable child? When a child goes missing elsewhere in the world, people are (rightly) up in arms about it. So, I decided to pursue it, and see what TBT had to say for itself. I e-mailed them only minutes ago, but if/when word comes back to me, I'll be sure to pass the story along to you.

Curiosities in the Digital Universe: Round I, Part 1

I am not, nor have I ever been, employed by AT&T. But I did happen to stumble upon Today's Big Thing, a website (seemingly sponsored by the communications giant) in my daily sojourn on this, the Interweb, and saw a few videos I'd like to share:

See more funny videos and TBT Videos at Today's Big Thing.

See more funny videos and TBT Videos at Today's Big Thing.

See more funny videos and TBT Videos at Today's Big Thing.

Okay, so I know this is the laziest of all posts - especially considering it's not the "lazy Sunday" I've begun to allow myself - but: a) I'd love to see one of my professors hop a lab table to hunt down a rogue chicken dancer; b) HOLYCRAPDIDYOUSEETHATGUYFLIPOVERTHATRAIL?! THATCAN'TBEREALCANIT?! (But seriously, that's cool stuff); c) I need one of those. Big time.