More info:

• Icons Among Us: Jazz In The Present Tense home page (photos and video)
• IMDB page
• New York Times Review (4/19/2009)
• All About Jazz article

• Icons Among Us on Amazon.com

Enjoy!

What will replace it? So far, nothing, not even mog.com comes close. Maybe Apple will launch itunes.com soon, and retain most of the social networking features of lala.com. Only time will tell.

P.S. A bunch of music I embedded from lala.com just went dark too. Oh well. So much for living in the cloud…

56 seconds of bliss: dado moroni and tom harrell doing a soundcheck. i love listening to and watching musicians deal with the creative process. rehearsing a new tune, creating new vamp. eye contact. smiles. i even have a collection of mistakes. betty carter starting a song off too fast, having to say sorry, stop, start again (and i love that betty left that on the recording). a whole bunch of charlie parker outtakes. it’s all good!

listen to the first ten seconds. not only did betty start this song too fast. not only did she stop and restart the song at a slower tempo. not only did she leave the mistake on her recording. this is the title track of the album.

otoh, the song is all about “stumbling and droppin’ things!”

Huh?

This had happened once before and we were able to find instructions for clearing the fault. This time, finding appropriate information online was difficult, but ultimately successful.

So if you have this problem, download Dacor’s Diagnostic Manual and carefully follow the instructions for the ERC Quick Test on page 3. That worked for us.

If your control pad doesn’t have one of the buttons contained in the test, skip it and move on to the next. Don’t forget to hold the “cook time” button for ten seconds in step 9.

Good luck!

I recently came across James Mahone’s Practice Portal blog. James writes about music, and frequently includes mp3s and, often, lead sheets and solo transcriptions. Three examples:

• Yusef Lateef’s Koko’s Tune
• Kenny Garrett’s Rendition of Trane’s Liberia

• Abbey Lincoln’s Bird Alone (including a transcription of Stan Getz’s great solo)

A lot of other stuff is there and he adds new posts all the time. I’m really looking forward to tackling Bird Alone; it’s a great ballad.

As always, of course, ymmv. Enjoy!

Today, the President signed the Senate health care reform bill into law. The reconciliation bill is still pending and will likely be completed by next week, bringing a long, tortuous and messy process to a close.

Just when the legislation appeared ready to fail at many points, some deft sausage-making kept things moving:

• Nancy Pelosi wouldn’t have had enough votes to pass the bill last fall if she hadn’t adopted the “Stupak Amendment” regarding federal funding of abortion.
• The “Cornhusker Kickback” and other special deals were necessary to get the sixty votes required to pass the Senate bill on Christmas Eve. No deals – no health care bill.
• If Senate Democrats didn’t have sixty-votes, it’s unlikely there would be comprehensive health care reform. Republicans tried to kill the bill as a matter of political strategy. Important regulatory and other changes couldn’t have been adopted via reconciliation.
• The election of Scott Brown was essential to uniting Democrats. There were never enough Democratic votes in the House or the Senate to adopt single payer, the public option or medicare buy-in, but the “progressive” base of the party kept pushing for it. The Brown election helped Democrats get realistic about what was possible, and that helped Democrats recognize that while the health care bill wasn’t perfect, it was a good foundation that also represented historic change.
• When the Brown election had demoralized Democrats declaring health care reform dead (oh ye little faith, Barney Frank!), Obama created a new intermediate distraction (the Summit) to buy some time to adjust to the new situation. He used the summit to make it clear to everyone that Republicans were simply trying to delay, and to make it clear that he was going to push forward.

Ultimately, there’s nothing like a good external (existential?) threat. Democratic legislators, faced with potentially catastrophic election prospects in November, finally figured out their best course of action was to finish the job.

Great legislation requires some core principles, a strategy, good people working hard to execute, great internal and external communications, etc. But it also requires an ability to improvise and to change as required. There’s always a risk of failure, but you make the decisions you have to make to keep things moving forward. And if you’re lucky, well:

I am increasingly upset with the news coming from Washington. The news media is reporting that Speaker Pelosi says there are not enough Democratic votes in the House to pass the health care reform bill approved by the Senate in December. My preference is that the House pass that bill and make required changes using the reconciliation process.

If Democrats don’t figure out how to do that and let this bill die or drag on for months, I will vote against Democrats in 2010 and beyond, and will urge all my friends and associates to do the same.

We didn’t elect you so you could get reelected. We elected you to stand for Democratic principles and to actually make them happen. Period.

You guys need to prove Will Rogers wrong!!

Maybe if our politicians get the message, they’ll get the courage of our convictions??

Tweetie version 2 blows version 1 and everything else away! There’s so much they got right it’s hard to explain. I have a couple of quibbles with the new version that are so minor, so deep, deep under what most users would ever notice, that I’d look like the anal retentive I must surely be.

Suffice it to say, if you’ve got an iPhone, pay the damn $2.99 for Tweetie. It’s fantastic!

often I sing when I’m all alone,
and no one can see me but me.
i think and wonder what i am
and how i came to be.

i can swim the ocean,
and it’s deep and wide,
and in the house above me
abide.

maybe one day i’ll fly like an eagle,
fly like a bird and go and go.
soar like an eagle,
walk like a lion,
although it won’t be i know.

but i can swim the ocean,
and it’s deep and wide,
and in the house above me
abide.

i guess the time has come for me to go.
and look around for something, oh,
just moving in my house you know.
moving slowly is not really bad,
moving slowly you see
the wonders of the deep,
just waiting there for me.

and i can swim the ocean,
and it’s deep and wide,
and in the house above me
abide.

and in the house above me
abide…

of course, abbey sings the hell out of it too!

I love golf and have spent countless hours watching, reading, practicing and playing it. As much as I’ve learned over the years, I’m always amazed when I listen to someone like Johnny Miller or Nick Faldo describe a golfer’s swing on television.

Miller and Faldo see things at full speed that I can barely recognize after they’ve explained it to me with the aid of super-slow-motion HD video. Supination? Angles? Inside path? Outside? Too steep? Too shallow? How about that “thump” sound in a bunker? Or how they can tell whether there was grass between the club and ball, whether the shot is fat or thin, by listening to the sound?

The thing is, when it comes to golf, I don’t know even one-tenth of what I don’t know. There are people who know a lot more, and I learn so much just by being in their presence.

That’s exactly how diversity works. It’s not that a group (racial, gender, ethnic, etc.) can only be represented by a member of that group. It’s more likely that non-members may not even know what they don’t know. It’s what they wouldn’t even think about unless someone “more diverse” (in background, experience, point of view) was there.

Justices describe the presence of Thurgood Marshall’s stories as more influential than his single vote on cases. His mere presence in the room altered the trajectory of their deliberations. They had to think about how Thurgood would hear and react to what they might say¹:

“‘Marshall could be a persuasive force just by sitting there,’ Justice Antonin Scalia told Juan Williams in an interview for a biography of Justice Marshall, recalling the justices’ private conferences about cases. ‘He wouldn’t have to open his mouth to affect the nature of the conference and how seriously the conference would take matters of race.’”

The same thing applies to the women who have served on the Court. They know stuff that the men simply would never consider. Their mere presence enriched the discussions, at least in certain areas.

BTW, my point is not a new one. For example, see Every Justice Creates a New Court by Linda Greenhouse.

Diversity affects companies the same way. It’s just always better to have a panoply of opinions and experiences. Courts and companies make better decisions that way. Especially when the leader knows how to assemble and manage a good team!

¹ The Waves Minority Judges Always Make by the New York Times’ Adam Liptak.