Year-End List-Mania! With Hyphens!

This being that time of year, I figured I'd throw my hat in the ring with two end-of-2008 lists.  The first is the standard "My Favorite New Albums of 2008," while the second is a less-than-standard "Favorite Older Albums I Hadn't Heard Until 2008."

The first list is common, in part because it lets people express their tastes in a way that projects them as a relentlessly up-to-date and with-it person.  I haven't seen the second list anywhere else, perhaps in part because it tells more about what people haven't been following closely, with all the inherent small embarrassments.  ("I think of Bach as a focus of my performance, but I haven't listened to the Milstein recordings until now?  Could I be that lame?")

As far as 2009 goes: I'm looking forward to the new releases from U2, Saxon Shore, and Gutbucket, as well as everything coming from the Cold Blue label (including new discs from John Luther Adams and Peter Garland).  And there's always the huge 365 Days Project, which yields up new and fun things every time I go back to it.  Not to mention two projects with which I'm personally involved: Stuart Smith's Links I-XI project on New World Records, and a disc from Easy Worship Operator, which we'll be recording over the summer.

Any of you with your own suggestions or lists should just comment your hearts out.  Have a great holiday season, stay warm, and eat the cookies.  They're probably delicious, and you deserve it.

Top 21 Releases of 2008:

20. (tie) Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Bach: The Art of the Fugue; Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Hommage a Messiaen (both on DG)
19. Brad Mehldau Trio, Live (Nonesuch)
18. Rhymefest, Man In the Mirror (independent release)
17. John Hollenbeck, Rainbow Jimmies (GPE)
16. Mogwai, The Hawk is Howling (Wall of Sound)
15. Bennie Maupin, Early Reflections (ECM)
14. Meredith Monk, Impermanence (ECM)
13. The Great Depression, Forever Altered (Fire)
12. Dave Holland Sextet, Pass It On (Dare2)
11. Peter Garland: Three Strange Angels (Sort of 2008-- TSA is a Tzadik re-release of the out-of-print Border Music album from 1989.)
10. Chromeo, Fancy Footwork (VICE)
9. Vijay Iyer, Tragicomic (Sunnyside)
8. Sigur Ros, Med sud i eyrum vid spilum endalaust (XL)
7. Flying Lotus, Los Angeles (Warp)
6. Steve Reich and Musicians, Daniel Variations (Nonesuch)
5. Jean Geoffroy, Bach: Sonates, BWV 1001, 1003, 1005 (Skarbo)
4. Radiohead, In Rainbows (_Xurbia_Xendless Limited)
3. David Byrne and Brian Eno, Everything That Happens Will Happen Today  (TodoMundo)
2. Marek Konstantynowicz, Cikada Ensemble, Christian Eggen, Norwegian Radio Orchestra, Feldman: The Viola in My Life I-IV (ECM)
1. Nik Bartsch's Ronin, Holon (ECM)

Top 15 I discovered in 2008:

15. Slow Six, Nor'easter (New Albion)
14. Christer Bothen Trio, Triolos (LJ) (Impulse buy at Square Records in Akron.  Free jazz trio with bass clarinet and Renaissance string instruments.  Awesome.)
13. Charlie Parker, Charlie Parker With Strings (Verve) (Took me long enough, huh?  And I used to teach jazz history.)
12. Rudresh Mahanthappa, Mother Tongue (Pi)
11. Sigur Ros, Hvarf-Heim (XL)
10. RJD2, Deadringer (Rj's Electrical Connections) (The track that samples Reich's Electric Counterpoint was playing over the store PA at Zia Records in Tempe-- the rest of it's great too.)
9. The Wailin' Jennys, Firecracker (Red House) (Heard them sing "Prairie Town" on Garrison Keillor's show.  Immediately fired up iTunes.)
8. Boomish, Clearance Sale (EFA Meiden) (Thanks Rachel.)
7. Tom Waits, a swath of albums beginning with Swordfishtrombones (Island/Def Jam) and ending with Bone Machine (UMG)
6. John Luther Adams, For Lou Harrison (New World)
5. Ralph Towner and Gary Burton, Matchbook (ECM)
4. From the Kitchen Archives, No. 2: Steve Reich and Musicians, Live 1977 (Orange Mountain)
3. Nathan Milstein, Bach: Sonatas and Partitas (DG) (Aaaarggh!)
2. Hammock, Raising Your Voice...Trying to Stop an Echo (Darla)
1. Elvis Costello/Brodsky Quartet, The Juliet Letters (Warner Bros.)

Podcast Quote of the Day

From Chicago Public Radio's podcast of the rock-and-roll talk show Sound Opinions, discussing the synthesizer sounds on a recent Roots album:

...German, but still somehow human...

Accidental ouch.

Steve Jobs on the creative process and roadblocks

This is from a CNN Money/Fortune Magazine interview. It's really really good. It's also part 10 of a 15-part interview summary-- you should go read the whole thing if you get a moment or 15.

"At Pixar when we were making Toy Story, there came a time when we were forced to admit that the story wasn't great. It just wasn't great. We stopped production for five months.... We paid them all to twiddle their thumbs while the team perfected the story into what became Toy Story. And if they hadn't had the courage to stop, there would have never been a Toy Story the way it is, and there probably would have never been a Pixar.
"We called that the 'story crisis,' and we never expected to have another one. But you know what? There's been one on every film. We don't stop production for five months. We've gotten a little smarter about it. But there always seems to come a moment where it's just not working, and it's so easy to fool yourself - to convince yourself that it is when you know in your heart that it isn't.

"Well, you know what? It's been that way with [almost] every major project at Apple, too.... Take the iPhone. We had a different enclosure design for this iPhone until way too close to the introduction to ever change it. And I came in one Monday morning, I said, 'I just don't love this. I can't convince myself to fall in love with this. And this is the most important product we've ever done.'

"And we pushed the reset button. We went through all of the zillions of models we'd made and ideas we'd had. And we ended up creating what you see here as the iPhone, which is dramatically better. It was hell because we had to go to the team and say, 'All this work you've [done] for the last year, we're going to have to throw it away and start over, and we're going to have to work twice as hard now because we don't have enough time.' And you know what everybody said? 'Sign us up.'

"That happens more than you think, because this is not just engineering and science. There is art, too. Sometimes when you're in the middle of one of these crises, you're not sure you're going to make it to the other end. But we've always made it, and so we have a certain degree of confidence, although sometimes you wonder. I think the key thing is that we're not all terrified at the same time. I mean, we do put our heart and soul into these things."

I love that Steve Jobs' overriding criterion is whether or not he can "convince [him]self to fall in love" with the work. Not a bad standard to set for yourself.

Awesome music/dance article in today's NY Times

Here it is. It's a rich, fair, and timely examination of the benefits and costs of using live music vs. taped music in dance performances. A choice quote from Joan Acocella (and somewhat self-serving-- w/r/t me, not Ms. Acocella):

"Dance audiences, I believe, have now got used to taped music, and you can get used to it, the same way you can learn to eat Spam instead of ham, or breathe smog instead of air. Your life is just diminished, and you don’t realize it until you see concerts such as we saw last month..."

I'll be in Phoenix all next week, for business and pleasure. Enjoy the season!

We are all designers of some sort

A proposed procedure for designing stuff, be it communications stuff or artsy stuff.  Enjoy.  It's a cool blog.

I'll probably be posting a bit less over the next few weeks as I travel for the holidays. Enjoy yours.

Parody Chains/Rampant Interdisciplinary Play/Just For Fun

Peter Sellers doing Olivier doing Richard III doing the Beatles. Cheers, and stay warm.

KSU Modern I/Improv Open Thread

For Alicia Diaz's Modern I Improv Class:

Please use this thread for any public comments you'd like to make regarding the class-- how well it worked for you, what things could be improved, etc.

You can also send your comments directly to Alicia by email; her address is adiaz3@kent.edu.

Quick note for KSU commenters

Thanks so much for your input. I'll moderate whatever's left by midnight tonight so we can talk about all of your comments a bit tomorrow.

When you comment, please make sure you click on the "Name/URL" radio button and enter your name there. You can also type your name at the end of your post if you'd like, but my moderating job gets much simpler (especially when I'm keeping track of comments) if you also enter your name under the radio button. Thanks.

A/B/G postscript

In university music programs, pretty much everyone gets a weekly one-on-one lesson on their instrument with their professor. If you're focusing on building technique, this is extremely helpful, because your weekly lesson will nip problems quickly and keep you from going too far down unproductive roads. Your weekly lesson is also your weekly meeting with the carrot and the stick, should you forget why you're doing what you do.

If you're working on repertoire, though, it's a different situation. It's an A/B/G progression toward some goal, and since your lesson involves SHOWING YOUR WORK TO SOMEONE, your lesson is automatically Beta time. So instead of progressing from Alpha to Beta to Gamma, you jump almost immediately to Beta, and stay there for almost all of the process. (It's possible to do Gamma in lessons as well, usually with the preamble, "Let's just run it.")

Is this resonating with any of you musicians out there? How many of you want about a month of Alpha time before you take a lesson on your stuff? How many of you teachers are afraid that if you gave a month to a student for Alpha work, they'd end up being lazy and doing nothing? At what point can you trust your students to navigate the A/B/G process on their own?

Is this thing ready?

One of the blogs in the right-hand margin is about software development and management. I discovered Rands in Repose through a good friend of mine in Arizona who told me about the care and feeding of nerds. (Was she trying to tell me something?) That blog is here because a) Rands (not his real name) is a really good writer, and b) the creative process is similar enough to software development that you can cadge some really good ideas from sources like this.

Dancers, musicians, writers, artists, and programmers are all involved in the same process: transforming a concept into a thing. That thing might be a piece of movement or sound or code, but the process is basically the same, and the software folks have devised a process with clear, discrete stages, so you can quickly and concretely describe your current project state.

(Quick aside: the Rands post on these stages deals with how these stages are losing their original meanings in the software world, but knowing about the stages themselves is what's most germane here. What's not germane about the post, but *is* amusing, is reflecting on a time when the social-networking site competition was mainly between Friendster, Orkut, and Tribe. Four years is a long time.)

The stages (with cadged-from-Rands-and-paraphrased descriptions) are:

• Alpha: "From a distance, it looks like it could become something, but please don't touch it or it'll fall apart."

Alpha is your splashing/trolling/throwing-out phase. You've found one or two germinal things, but very little exists in terms of structure or connective material. As a choreographer, your piece is in Alpha if you've got a phrase or two that you like, but no idea how to utilize them compositionally and no music. Or maybe you've got music and a couple images, but very little is moving yet. Basically, your work is in Alpha if it's too early to show to anyone else, either because there's nothing to show or because your own mind is so cluttered with half-shaped ideas that other perspectives would just muddy things up. If you're a musician, any and all note-learning time is Alpha time-- don't kid yourself about being farther down the road than you are.

• Beta: "Take a look and let me know what you think, though I'm not entirely sure it won't explode. Wear goggles."

Unlike Alpha, Beta is where you NEED other people to see it. Beta is the most commonly-seen phase in software development, because releasing a program in Beta is the best way to find out what's wrong with it-- just throw it out there and wait for the complaint emails.

(I'm running one piece of software that's truly beta-- my Quicksilver launcher program-- and it does freeze and make me force-quite iTunes every few days. Big deal-- if it's beta, things like that are supposed to happen, and when it works, I can do almost anything [yes, anything] on my computer with 5-10 keystrokes. With Quicksilver running, I can open iTunes, Stickies, NewsFire, and my Gmail account, AND log in to Facebook in about 10 seconds. It rocks.)

Got two or three large sections of work done, but unconnected to each other? Beta. Got most of the movement done and need to decide on costumes and commission a score? Beta. Asking for teachers and peers to take a quick peek and give advice? You guessed it. Most of what's seen at dance showings is Beta stuff.

Your colleagues are vital parts of Beta-- every work needs some cold examination, and you've just spent all your Alpha time falling in love with your materials. Get fresh eyes-- your colleagues will see things you can't, whether those things are defects (get rid of them) or opportunities (check them out).

• Gamma: "Unless we find a heinous problem, it's ready to go."

Software companies have ship dates; artists have performances and gallery openings. Either way, there's a point where you STOP FIXING SMALL PROBLEMS. If you're fixing small problems, or tinkering in any way, you're in Beta. (And that's fine. Fix and tinker if you want-- just don't fool yourself into thinking that you're ready for curtain.) Big problems do get fixed in Gamma, but here, literal show-stoppers are the only big problems. Tech and dress rehearsals had better expletive-well be Gamma or you're way screwed.

Getting to Gamma early can be as tricky as getting there late-- Gamma a month before your show means you've got to maintain freshness while rehearsing the same thing over and over. Don't overwork and get burned out. Don't underwork and get sloppy.

Three stages-- neat, clean, and easy to remember. You've probably felt some of these stages yourself; internal statements like, "I wonder what so-and-so would have to say about this" and, "There's not enough time to change that phrase" are affirmations that you're at a certain A/B/G place. Sure, the terms don't catch all of the subtleties of the current moment, but if I told you that my piece is kind of messy right now but would be Beta in two weeks, you'd have a pretty clear idea where it's at.