Rosco

All good advice. I'm another one who dips into the Inner Game of Music book on a regular basis. That's got me out of more than one rut over the last few years. Here's something I like to do when the rut strikes: Play some music you wouldn't normally play. In a hard bop group? Try jamming with a rock band. R&B honker? Play some classical etudes. Sound like Lester Young? Do an imitation of Albert Ayler. I had a slump a few years back and got out of it by having a weekly jam with some rock playing friends of mine. The music was less demanding than the changes-based jazz I'd been playing, so I was able to 'switch off' the cerebral part of my musical thinking and just play. And I became a better jazz player because of it- I learned out to tap into that 'feeling' of just letting go while playing, even when things get demanding. I learned something by taking everything back to basics, which should be obvious but so often isn't. (Oh, and everything they played was in E or A- the horn players hated keys ) Take yourself out of your normal 'comfort zone'. And allow yourself to fail at it. At the very least it's palette cleansing and you may discover some musical resources you didn't know you had.

...and disc 6 just finished!

WOOOOHOOOOOOO!!!!! UK release date is finally here! (just five and a half months late... ) Just got back from buying it... CD 1 just gone into the player!

Depends what you call 'living'.

Oh my yes! Nicely put together documentary with lots of the usual talking heads from various stages of Miles' career (and Couch pitches up to make an ass of himself) but it's all just a prelude to the Isle of Wight set which is marvellous stuff.

I seem to recall liking some early Yellowjackets stuff when Robben Ford was playing guitar for them (although I also recall some cringe-inducing synth sounds). Not heard those records in years, though.

Stilll another week until the British release date...

Incidentally, 'Essential' includes all but one track from 'Stand' in the original LP sequence (the omission being the epic stoned groove of 'Sex Machine') and six of the 11 tracks from 'Fresh' (curiously omitting Sly's- uh- idiosyncratic take on 'Que Sera, Sera') Really, the original albums are so good if you're even curious about Sly you'll end up needing them.

Agreed. Maybe OK as a Sly primer but I certainly wouldn't pass over 'Riot' in favour of it. Or 'Stand' or 'Fresh'.

No "Crossword Puzzle". A major omission.

The original album runs 1. Luv 'n' Haight 2. Just Like a Baby 3. Poet 4. Family Affair 5. Africa Talks to You "The Asphalt Jungle" There's a Riot Goin' On 6. Brave & Strong 7. Smilin' 8. Time 9. Spaced Cowboy 10. Runnin' Away 11. Thank You for Talking to Me Africa

Disc 2 of Essential starts- 1. Family Affair 2. Luv 'n' Haight 3. Poet 4. You Caught Me Smilin' 5. Runnin' Away 6. Brave & Strong 7. Just Like a Baby 8. Thank You For Talkin' to Me, Africa so I count three missing songs, 'Africa Talks to You "The Asphalt Jungle"', 'Time' and 'Spaced Cowboy' oh, and it's also missing 'There's a Riot's title track

Damn. I used to get 3sat back in the days of satellite TV. Lost it when I switched to cable.

Auditory stimulus which produces an emotional response in the listener. The listener is the key. The Ear of the Behearer as someone once said.

I thought Pete Losin would have the answer, though last time I checked the site was down. Thanks for that.

Really!!! Those clips were incredible. That's how to remember Sly!

At the risk of this thread being moved to the political forum... http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4695376.stm Congress 'made Wikipedia changes' By Matthew Davis BBC News, Washington Online reference site Wikipedia blames US Congress staff for partisan changes to a number of political biographies. Computers traced to Capitol Hill removed unpalatable facts from articles on senators, while other entries were "vandalised", the site said. An inquiry was launched after staff for Democratic representative Marty Meehan admitted polishing his biography. Wikipedia is produced by readers who add entries and edit any page, and has become a widely-used reference tool. Using the public history of edits on Wikipedia, researchers collected the internet protocol numbers of computers linked to the US Senate and tracked the changes made to online pages. The site lists half a dozen prominent biographies that had been changed by Senate computers, including those of Minnesota Senator Norm Coleman, California Senator Dianne Feinstein and Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa. Senator Coleman's office has confirmed that staff there had made a number of changes to his online record. Where he was described as a "liberal" back in college, this was changed to "activist". Among other changes, staff also deleted a reference to Mr Coleman voting with President Bush 98% of the time in 2003, despite running as a moderate the year before. Wikipedia said staffers of Senator Tom Harkin had removed a paragraph relating to Mr Harkin's having falsely claimed to have flown combat missions over North Vietnam, and his subsequent recantation. A handful of miscellaneous vandalism edits had been made to some senators' articles, it said. One example was the entry for Republican Senator Tom Coburn, of Oklahoma, who it was falsely alleged had been voted "most annoying senator". Senator Coleman's chief of staff, Erich Mische, said editing was done to correct inaccuracies and delete information that was not reflective of the politician. "They've got an edit provision on there for the sake of editing when things are not accurate," Mr Mische told the Associated Press. "I presume that if they did not want people to edit, they wouldn't allow you to edit." Wikipedia says the controversy raises questions about whether it is ethical for those with a vested interest in the subject to edit entries about it. It said the Congressional computer network has been blocked from editing for brief periods on a number of occasions in the last six months due to the inappropriate contributions. The article on President Bush has been altered so many times - not just from within Congress - that Wikipedia's volunteer monitors have had to block further "editing". But it also says its investigation showed the vast majority of edits from Senate IPs were "beneficial and helpful". Massachusetts newspapers disclosed last month that staffers for Representative Marty Meehan had polished the boss's Wikipedia biography. Deleted were references to a long-abandoned promise to serve only four terms, and to his campaign war chest. Wikipedia was founded in 2001 and has since grown to more than 1.8 million articles in 200 languages. Some 800,000 entries are in English. It is based on wikis, open-source software which lets anyone fiddle with a webpage. Anyone reading a subject entry can disagree, edit, add, delete, or replace the entry. A December 2005 study by the British journal Nature found it was about as accurate on science as the Encyclopaedia Britannica. But it has been criticised for the correctness of entries, most recently over the biography of prominent US journalist John Seigenthaler - which incorrectly linked him to the Kennedy assassinations.

I have the Japanese Pangaea. Like the Japanese Aghatha the sound is much better than on the Columbia-versions. That said, I can't compare them to the original LP's. Any extra music on the Japanese edition?

Last time I ate a McDonalds was about 15 years ago. I tend to avoid any food you can still taste four days after eating it. But that's just me. Aside from the food tasting like crap, I object to McDonalds for a variety of other reasons.

I have the Japanese 'Agartha'; 'Mayisha' comes to a proper end- as opposed to the fade on all other versions- and the final few minutes of disc 2 have some additional feedback/ bleeps/ rattling percussion. A few minutes extra in total although if you don't have them I wouldn't lose any sleep unless you're a real Miles nut. That said, I do prefer the mix on the Japanese version. Anyone got the Japanese 'Pangaea'?

I have a bootleg video of a gig during that period. Cosey cuts quite an imposing figure (no mean feat in a Miles band!) playing seated, surrounded by guitars (if memory serves he plays some 12 string) and flanked by a table littered with percussion instruments. His hair is something else too! One OUT looking cat! I've always wondered about Dominque Gaumont's contribution to Dark Magus. That album is such a wall of sound I can't really figure ou what's what. Although in some ways it seems beside the point.

It was going to those same jazz workshop and playing with guys who couldn't put a solo together but could read the shit out of the dots that forced me to come to grips with notation. Here's an example of what I mean by an 'intuitive' understanding of music, with regards to rhythm. I come across guys who count rhythm- beats, bars. If they're taking a 16 bar rest, you'll see them actually counting off the bars. If they're playing a note on the 'and' of 2 you'll see them counting the 1-and-2 before it. I've never done any of that. Coming from an 'untutored' angle, I developed- had to develop- a feel for where the rhythms were. Never counted bars- hell, when I first started playing I didn't know what a bar was, much less how to count them. I developed a way of feeling the rhythms- hard to explain but everything I heard I processed as part of 'the dance'. One of the upshots of this is that I am not troubled by less common time signatures. Again, when I started out I didn't know what a time signature was- but I 'felt' 5/4 or 7/8 just the same way as I 'felt' 4/4. At first I couldn't understand why people had problems playing in those rhythms. Same with the structure of tunes- I often play with people who get lost in an AABA or an ABAC or an ABCD- fuck, even a twelve bar blues (!)- once they lose themselves on the page and can't find their way back in. I'm always telling players to 'feel' where they are in the tune- listen to and feel the expansion and contraction of the chords and it'll lead you back to where you started. These things seem obvious to me but it amazes me how little these basic elements are dealt with in formal teaching.

Not so, man. I picked up guitar at 12, trained by a blues & rock musician. (Weekly) private instruction lasted well into my last years of high school. The thing is, those last couple of years--very little learning. Chalk half of it up to personal initiative, the other half to incongruous teaching techniques. I had to teach myself the physics of jazz. I just got charts thrown in front of me--I had no idea what to play. It gives me panic attacks up to the present day--I didn't learn the whole chord=scale paradigm until college. Granted such poor formal instruction in jazz-based improv, it's a miracle I can play this stuff at all. It's not the teacher that matters--it's the right reacher. It paid off in the way of blues/rock playing, though--I can still do a mean Cream-era Clapton. Right- this is something I find a lot of, going to (and now occasionally leading) jazz workshops. Players who are highly competent in certain areas- reading, especially- who have no idea how to approach the act of creating something on the changes and are unable to deal with the inner workings of music (harmony, rhythm, melodic development) on any deeper level. When I first started going to jazz workshops, I was actually kind of shocked by that. That had been my whole approach up to that point (rather than reading) so I came equipped with a whole different set of skills- ones that I had developed pretty much intuitively. That's why I say, the 'formal' approach to these things isn't always the best.

True, of course. I've learned at least a little- and often a lot- from all the people I've worked with, talked to, seen, read about, listened to... 'Being taught' (in the formal sense) is a short-cut through that process although by no means always the best one.