I’m a huge fan of the United States Air Force Airmen of Note. Started by Glenn Miller during WWII, the band carries the legacy of jazz forward with monstrous joy. (I’ve posted about them before, so will spare you the history here.)
Friday night, they played with Joey DeFrancesco, a master of the Hammond B3 organ. Halfway through the show, the audience was standing up for each performance. There are many things to love about the Airmen, but one is that when the music is good you can see it on the faces of everyone in the band. And it was GOOD! That kind of joy is contagious and the audience becomes enraptured. Oh, and Joey was pretty wonderful too. There’s something about a well played organ and a big leslie cabinet . . .
Coming away from this show I was pleased to hear that a Grammy award winning jazz band was playing at a nearby festival. I went and was disappointed. The music was technically perfect, but it was boring. I was thinking about why one performance I saw was marvelous and one was so the other way. I wrote and re-wrote this until I got to the main point. One band was having a great time. The other didn’t appear to be having any fun at all.
Solos by the Airmen were technically perfect, and some of them lightning speed and many were a little out, i.e., jumping out of the key for a little while and then in. (Non-jazz initiated ears find this hard to understand sometimes.) You could see the band reacting to each solo, supporting the soloist, enjoying the solo. The other band’s solos were all lightning speed and technically perfect, but passed into wallpaper quickly. The other band members stepped out of the way, moved around the stage, just waiting for their turn. They were just getting through an hour long festival performance. I looked around and didn’t see too many listeners paying more then perfunctory attention. Didn’t see many people at the CD table afterwards either.
It’s unrealistic to expect every band to have a great performance, and maybe it was an off day for the other band. But it got me to thinking how support for each other translates to support from an audience. Both were playing great music, but one was successful, the other not so much. I wonder if the other band would sound better another day, but I’m not sure I’d be inclined to try.
I’m a jazz musician, a bass player and vocalist, so I think about these things. Perhaps it’s not appropriate to post this on Open Salon, but here it is anyway. I think this observation could apply to other kinds of endeavors as well.
And I do appreciate the support that OS members provide for each other. Y’all are a good bunch of folks.
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Even the best performers may give an off performance and I suppose mediocre talent can sometimes surpass itself. One key is a connection with the audience. There's a DVD of Ellen in which she is just kind of flat at the start. Before too long, she connects with the audience, and from there on, she's sailing.
This is a Hoax.
The author keeps pulling posts that show this is a bogus blog. Coward and fraud. If this were just errors or mistakes he wouldn't pull posts claiming hoax, he'd rebut the claims. He doesn't.
None of the references or links are to what they purport to be.
The reference to Time is from 2006.
There is no Macy's building near Case Western Reserve in Cleveland (I'm a resident I know better). Most Likely from Chicago.
The foliage in the background isn't winter either, and the protestors are dressed wrong for winter
There is no 'Novus' publishing works on genomes, either from Case or anywhere else.
Similar work to that described from other Case researchers appeared in 2002.
CCoR (visible on the lower right of the placards) is the Chicago Council of Rationality).
Probably from a fake protest to promote Bill Mayer's "Religulous"
The Freedom From Religion Foundation had its National Meeting last month...November 2009, there is no major meeting in January 2010 for Novus to speak at.
There are no references to this in the Cleveland Plain Dealer or other publications linked to.
The only link that seems to be what it's supposed to be is the snake-oil young earther preacher
The URL link says 'noman' not Norman. Freudian slip or clue?
Graduate students aren't interviewed about papers...their professor is the primary author and would be the one to take any interviews.
I'm hoping if I keep posting this it will come to the attention of the hard to reach Salon staff and they'll take appropriate action.
Also hope others pick up on this and flood the guy so he can't take down damning posts as fast as they come in.
Your comment to my post is inappropriate. Comments are supposed to be related to the post itself. This post is about live music performances, not about Norman Novus. You can send me a message if you like, or you can post on the blog to which I commented. You can also post a reply to your own blog.
I saw a performance at a festival of a local group I'd never heard of. They were young and not really polished as musicians, but they were having a grand time and it translated marvelously. The whole room was shakin' and everyone was moving. Puttin' your heart in it makes all the difference.