The Bass-less Trio

<p>Miles Davis asserts in his autobiography, that "a great artist needs to be able to stretch" [Davis, Troup, 1990]. While I may not a great artist, I aspire to make art with my music, and in my own musical journey I have been interested in trying out new ideas. Jazz musicians, because of their various skills (and in particular, in the art of improvisation) find themselves straddling musical boundaries and genres, just to pay the rent. In my own projects however, this musical adroitness was born just as much out of artistic curiosity as it was necessity, leading me to compose and perform in a variety of contexts and styles for a broad range of instrumentation. These contexts and styles include: duos for saxophone and piano accordion; Bach sonatas with string ensembles; improvising live dance music with DJs; organ trios; in electronica contexts; art and poetry collaborations. The need for creativity has expressed itself in all of my work, to varying degrees. On reflection, it's the need to create something new and fresh out of work and ideas that are already explored to some extent. This desire is consistent with the jazz legacy I have inherited. In much the way Louis Armstrong began transforming popular songs into jazz vehicles, Charles Mingus took ideas from older African American musical traditions and transformed them to offer a fresh perspective on those traditions, and Miles Davis borrowed ideas from rock and soul music to pioneer new directions in jazz during the 1960s and 1970s, I too am looking for new avenues of expression for jazz musicians.</p>

The Bass-less Trio

<p>Miles Davis asserts in his autobiography, that "a great artist needs to be able to stretch" [Davis, Troup, 1990]. While I may not a great artist, I aspire to make art with my music, and in my own musical journey I have been interested in trying out new ideas. Jazz musicians, because of their various skills (and in particular, in the art of improvisation) find themselves straddling musical boundaries and genres, just to pay the rent. In my own projects however, this musical adroitness was born just as much out of artistic curiosity as it was necessity, leading me to compose and perform in a variety of contexts and styles for a broad range of instrumentation. These contexts and styles include: duos for saxophone and piano accordion; Bach sonatas with string ensembles; improvising live dance music with DJs; organ trios; in electronica contexts; art and poetry collaborations. The need for creativity has expressed itself in all of my work, to varying degrees. On reflection, it's the need to create something new and fresh out of work and ideas that are already explored to some extent. This desire is consistent with the jazz legacy I have inherited. In much the way Louis Armstrong began transforming popular songs into jazz vehicles, Charles Mingus took ideas from older African American musical traditions and transformed them to offer a fresh perspective on those traditions, and Miles Davis borrowed ideas from rock and soul music to pioneer new directions in jazz during the 1960s and 1970s, I too am looking for new avenues of expression for jazz musicians.</p>

Music perception and speech intelligibility in noise performance by Italian-speaking cochlear implant users

Objective The goal of this study was to investigate the performance correlations between music perception and speech intelligibility in noise by Italian-speaking cochlear implant (CI) users. Materials and methods Twenty postlingually deafened adults with unilateral CIs (mean age 65 years, range 46–92 years) were tested with a music quality questionnaire using three passages of music from Classical Music, Jazz, and Soul. Speech recognition in noise was assessed using two newly developed adaptive tests in Italian: The Sentence Test with Adaptive Randomized Roving levels (STARR) and Matrix tests. Results Median quality ratings for Classical, Jazz and Soul music were 63%, 58% and 58%, respectively. Median SRTs for the STARR and Matrix tests were 14.3 dB and 7.6 dB, respectively. STARR performance was significantly correlated with Classical music ratings (rs = − 0.49, p = 0.029), whereas Matrix performance was significantly correlated with both Classical (rs = − 0.48, p = 0.031) and Jazz music ratings (rs = − 0.56, p = 0.011). Conclusion Speech with competitive noise and music are naturally present in everyday listening environments. Recent speech perception tests based on an adaptive paradigm and sentence materials in relation with music quality measures might be representative of everyday performance in CI users. The present data contribute to cross-language studies and suggest that improving music perception in CI users may yield everyday benefit in speech perception in noise and may hence enhance the quality of listening for CI users.

Music and Gymnastic harmonization under the viewpoint of the platonic meaning of life

The essence of life according to Plato is summed up in the tendency of every living being to protect itself and its species from death, by searching immortality. This pursuit is achieved either by reproduction or by intellectual creation. In order for the soul to conquer the existence which will be worthy of man, it must separate from the mortal body. The highest goal of philosophical education is the soul to be led to the view of the idea of the good (agatho), which is the foundation of all knowledge. Thereunto, specific courses are proposed, Music, Gymnastics, Mathematics and Dialectics. Music is preceded temporal and absolute by gymnastics. The school of Pythagoras was the first to put the music-soul relationship, in the service of upbringing and mental physique. Plato attempts to establish man's tendency for rhythm and movement in nature and in the gods. At the same time, he emphasizes the balance between mental and physical education, in order to form the right ethos. For the best fulfillment of these terms, the two superior parts of the soul must be properly trained, the logical with music and the thymoides with gymnastics. The symmetrical movement of the body is ensured by exercise, while for the soul, music and philosophy are used. This targeted intervention will lead them to a harmonious connection. Moreover, it should be ensured that the movements are symmetrical with each other. This is the real goodness (kalokagathia). The unilateral cultivation of gymnastics at the expense of music is considered the main cause of the decline of the excellent republic and the decadence in oligarchy, in the regimein which the morality is imposed by violent, uneducated people who will have neglected the real Muse, the one who is accompanied by the logic and philosophy.

Blues Conditions

Between 1920 and 1960, blues was Black popular music. During the decade that followed, however, the Black blues audience largely melted away, redirecting its attentions towards soul music, and a large cohort of white blues fans and blues musicians emerged to fill that space—a cultural earthquake whose effects have lingered to the present day. This chapter, looking to educate that successor cohort, seeks to anchor our understandings of the blues in a fresh appreciation for the world in which the music’s Black southern creators lived. Jim Crow social relations, which included lynching and other forms of racial violence along with legislated segregation, were the crucible in which early blues players struggled to achieve personal freedom and develop their creative gifts. Slavery had been replaced by cotton sharecropping after Emancipation; new sexual freedoms and wide-ranging mobility, however compromised, were there to be explored, in blues lyricism as in life. Playwright August Wilson’s “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” vividly dramatizes these themes, offering revelations about the persistence of traumatic memories generated by white southern violence.

From Gospel to Rhythm and Blues

Ray Charles gets credit for turning gospel into soul music in the early 1950s, but Winston-Salem’s “5” Royales beat him to the top of the R&B charts by a couple of years. The Royales were a key transitional act in soul’s evolution, with a particular gift for bawdiness. They also contributed a number of oft-covered standards, most notably “Dedicated to the One I Love.” Steve Cropper of the legendary Memphis soul combo Booker T & the MG’s has admitted that Royales guitarist Lowman Pauling was his biggest influence.