Nick's Café Canadien

I’ve been neglecting this space for over two months. Unfortunately for my capacity to keep up with the world in written words, they have been two very interesting months. Had I posted a bag of links on a weekly basis—and this is already the laziest of projects, the most modest of ambitions I have ever had for this journal—the entries for the latter half of April and the first half of May could have been expended entirely on the British general election (with an inset for Thailand’s redshirt revolt) and still failed to capture the play-by-play thrills on the ground.

Somewhere along the way, I penned a dissertation of sorts, but let’s not talk about that. Here is the crust of readings that has built up in the meantime. There are more, but the list below was becoming rather overgrown and at some point I had to stop.

• Two of the great figures in things I care about passed away in May, both of them at ripe old ages after leading fulfilling lives: jazz pianist Hank Jones at 91; mathematical popularizer and Lewis Carroll expert Martin Gardner at 95. I came to both Jones’ and Gardner’s works late in life but quickly—very quickly—came to understand their immeasurable impacts on music and mathematics, respectively, which I had previously felt secondhand without being aware of it. More on Jones here and here; more on Gardner here and here.

• It speaks volumes for how long I’ve been away from saturating this page with hyperlinks that sitting atop the pile in my draft box is an ominous article by Dominic Lawson on David Cameron and Nick Clegg’s public-school upbringings at Eton and Westminster, written the week of the first televised debate.

• IBM has developed a Jeopardy!-playing computer. Observe the promotional video. From an AI perspective, this is orders of magnitude more exciting than Deep Blue, and takes us deep into Turing Test territory. I hope to say more about this should I find the time.

• One of the disadvantages of being in the United Kingdom—indeed, the most serious one I have yet encountered apart from the absence of fine, extravagant steaks—is that for the first time since 1998, I was unable to see a new Pixar film on or before the date of its release. Two Pixar films of note, in fact: Toy Story 3 and the accompanying Teddy Newton short Day and Night. That hasn’t stopped me from following the resurgence of coverage of Pixar’s process of perfection in this Wired piece and this interview with Lee Unkrich.

• Typesetting matters, folks. Just ask the consummate professionals behind these two book-size online resources: Typography for Lawyers, and LaTeX for Logicians.

• Everyone with an interest in the romance of modern international affairs has read it already, but Raffi Khatchadourian’s profile of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is an outstanding piece of storytelling, if also one that tends towards the making of myth.

• And while on the subject of journalism and international intrigue, here is the Rolling Stone feature on Stanley McChrystal that led him to be sacked from command in Afghanistan.

• Civilization V is on its way, but there’s still plenty to say about Civilization IV. Troy Goodfellow shares a letter from Christopher Tin about composing music for the game. Kotaku asks lead designer Soren Johnson about the mathematization of religion.

• Jeremy Parish reflects on this year’s Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) and calls out much of the game industry for the creative bankruptcy of video game violence.

• Neil Swidey of The Boston Globe courageously explores the mind of the anonymous comment-box troll.

• As this year’s graduate session at Singularity University gets underway, The New York Times talks to Ray Kurzweil and gang about the posthuman lifestyle.

• John Naughton writes in The Guardian about what the Internet has really changed.

• England has been swept up in the pathos and misery of football fever, as usual, and one may as well get some World Cup readings out of the way before the Three Lions have truly met with yet another ignominious doom. (Or, preferably, they could win.) Tim de Lisle enquires into the origins of spectator sport’s global draw. And then there’s this article on the North Korean national team, published in timely fashion just before Portugal blanked them 7-0.

• Finally, the only thing that can stop this asteroid is your liberal arts degree.

Fall away from the Internet for a week or two and the Internet falls on you. Here’s some of what I saw when I succumbed to its gelatinous reach:

• Turn up your speakers and read Jan Swafford’s article in Slate about performing classical piano repertoire on classical pianos, which is full of audio comparisons that will make you wonder if the homogenized ideal of the modern Steinway grand is really a good thing.

• The Guardian asks a wide selection of novelists for their writing tips, which have a way of telling us more about the authors than about writing. Some of my favourites: Geoff Dyer (“Don’t be one of those writers who sentence themselves to a lifetime of sucking up to Nabokov”), Anne Enright (“The first 12 years are the worst”), Philip Pullman (“My main rule is to say no to things like this, which tempt me away from my proper work”).

• Ben Goldacre shows us how regulating alternative folk medicine through requiring certification is no use at all when we don’t know what’s being certified.

• From The New York Times: Canadians shoot left, Americans shoot right. The article is about hockey players but I think there’s something bigger in this.

• Teresa Nielsen Hayden remarks on the imaginative poverty of failed authors who think suing J.K. Rowling for plagiarism is a good idea.

• Jonah Lehrer wonders if the direction of funding towards older scientists hinders us from tapping into the creativity of youth. Also read the followup on his Frontal Cortex blog.

• Civilization IV lead designer Soren Johnson talks about designing strategy games around our intuitions about probability (or lack thereof).

• Mark Chu-Carroll explains why computer simulations of biological phenomena will never replace animal testing.

• Joel Stickley’s explorations of bad writing by example finally catch on to my fatal flaw.

Kenny Werner performed in Edmonton on Thursday with his touring quintet (Randy Brecker (trumpet), David Sanchez (tenor sax), Scott Colley (bass), Antonio Sanchez (drums)). I am pleased to say it was one of the most complete jazz concerts I’ve seen, full of vitality and character at every turn.

Let me put it this way. After Werner whistled along to his own piano outro at the tail end of his lovely, lovely composition, “Uncovered Heart”—which he introduced as the song he wrote on the day his daughter was born—my classical composer companion leaned over to me and whispered, “So I’ve decided on his behalf that he is going to have more children.”

In retrospect, were we unable to plead ignorance it would have been a callous remark. What Mr Werner did not tell us was that his beloved daughter had perished in a car accident two years earlier. I suppose he trusted the music to speak for itself—and it did.

The band played a set consisting mostly of originals from his 2007 album Lawn Chair Society (“New Amsterdam”, “Uncovered Heart”, “The 13th Day”), but in a wholly acoustic setting, plus an unrecorded tune (“Balloons”, a lilting piece that bobbed up and down in thirds) and John Williams’ signature melody for the Harry Potter films (“Hedwig’s Theme”).

One can go on forever about how jazz is the quintessentially American music, and nowhere is it more American than in its ideal of individual liberty as the wellspring of greater collective achievement. This was one of those bands where every musician was consistently interesting to listen to, yet never selfish. Brecker’s dizzying bebop lines were an ample foil for David Sanchez’s wide expressive sweeps, and Antonio Sanchez was a real listener who clearly thought in ideas much bigger than patterns and strokes. Colley was a discovery for me, particularly the way he used pizzicato bass to trace smooth legato shapes and do far more than walk. And of Werner’s facility for drawing singsong melodies out of the piano, the more said the better. Elsewhere he cites Joni Mitchell as his primary musical influence, and I believe him.

Werner’s quintet was current, situated in the here and now and doing something fresh, while staying within an accessible jazz aesthetic with traditional instrumentation. The funk-and-swing pastiche of “New Amsterdam” highlighted the continued richness of acoustic instruments in predominantly electric forms, and the screaming intensity of “Hedwig’s Theme” harked back, however distantly, to what John Coltrane did to “My Favorite Things” decades ago. (I don’t hear nearly enough John Williams in jazz: up to the 1960s the adaptation of iconic themes from contemporary cinema and Broadway productions was a matter of course, and one would think that Williams, the definitive composer of film music from 1970 to present, would elicit more widespread treatment.)

There’s plenty of good jazz in the world. But great jazz? You’ll know it when you hear it—and I heard it.

Here is a rough approximation of what I saw at the Calgary Jazz Festival on Wednesday.

That was the ever-theatrical Hiromi Uehara playing the prototypical Gershwin bop standard, “I Got Rhythm”—and boy, does she ever—which she introduced in Calgary as a tribute to her “superhero” (and every other pianist’s), Oscar Peterson.

This is the odd thing about attending jazz concerts in the age of YouTube: you can go home and compare notes with the performer’s previous appearances. In a genre so reliant on improvisation, one of the most tantalizing mysteries in a concert setting is to sort out the spontaneous invention from the premeditated conspiracy of the arrangement. The magic of a great jazz band is that often, you can’t tell—and certainly not from one performance alone. Jazz collectors treasure alternate takes for precisely this reason. The only thing as surprising as the prevalence of well-practiced licks is the astounding synchronicity of a band’s adventures into the unplanned. So the experience of seeing a ghostly resemblance of what you just saw on stage squeezed into a browser window with lo-fi audio is, well, uncanny.

I also feel compelled to add that the performance approximated by the video above is about as representative of the rest of the concert as a musical photo negative. In other words, for the rest of their time onstage, Hiromi’s Sonicbloom (with Tony Grey on bass, Martin Valihora on drums, and David Fiuczynski on a double-necked guitar), playing selections from their 2007 album Time Control alongside standards like “Softly, as in a Morning Sunrise”, “Ue wo muite arukuo” (“Sukiyaki”), and “Caravan”, sounded like anything and everything but Oscar Peterson.

Most instrumentalists can be said to trace a glutinous outline of all their forebears in varying concentrations. But Hiromi isn’t every jazz piano style rolled into one: she’s any jazz piano style at discrete pockets of time. She’ll stride into the scene like Erroll Garner, let the grand piano ring over a melodious staircase of Kenny Barron intervals, take a Chick Corea minute to sing and sob on all her pads at once, launch into a Herbie Hancock space-age funk, and top it off a dash of Ahmad Jamal’s crispy blues—sometimes all in the same suite, and with the sporadic slam of the fists or forearm on the keys to make sure you’re paying attention.

I would not call this “seamless”, a word that implies the continuity of a polynomial. The transitions are abrupt, the stylistic lineages unmistakable. Listening to Hiromi is like witnessing a cubist tour of jazz and rock piano with the edges sharpened and the innards bursting out of frame. And while I’m admittedly not too fluent with the evolutionary histories of the other instruments, I get the distinct sense that her bandmates are doing the same, pushing their axes to the limits of their prog-rock vocabulary.

As exciting as it is to listen to musicians who grew up on everything and decided to play it all, one has to wonder if there’s anywhere to go next. If the contemporary style is a collision of styles, where do we go from here? Collisions within collisions, or somewhere else? A sonic bloom, indeed.

It’s difficult in the age of YouTube, weblogs, self-publication, and the Cult of the Amateur, but I try my level best never to crap all over people who are bad at what they do. Not everybody has the talent to be worth their salt in what they like doing, but people on the cusp of development have room to improve, and it doesn’t do any good to put them down. I’m sure that by strictly professional standards, I’m not very good at what I do either. In fact, I believe quite strongly that one of the essential steps to the mastery of a chosen skill—creative, competitive, or otherwise—is when you reach a stage where you understand how far you have to go before you can honestly consider yourself among the experts, even (and especially) if the casual observer can’t tell the difference.

When a shockingly incompetent amateur poses as a professional source of wisdom, is oblivious to said incompetence, and puts it on display for everyone to see in the form of an instructional video—well, that’s comedy, and it is my duty as a responsible citizen to point and guffaw as hard as I can so no poor fool gets suckered.

Meet Austin McBride, the worst “jazz” “pianist” on the Internet.

Ever wondered what it would be like to hear Sarah Palin deliver a lecture about foreign policy? That’s Austin McBride.

There is a very real possibility that he’s a sick comic genius. The timing of his musical offences is almost too perfect: the consistent pattern in his minute-long videos is to begin with a mangled explanation that might sound plausible to the absolute beginner, and follow it up with a punch line of an “experimental” demonstration.

Who else could come up with gems like this:

• “Here we have a little thing that I wrote in 5/4.” [proceeds to stomp out a 4/4 riff while counting aloud to five... and losing count] “There’s some 5/4 timing…”
• “Experimental jazz is often called free jazz because you’re free to do whatever the hell you want to do… so basically it’s playing jazz music as though a little kid would play.” [proceeds to play like a little kid]
• “So in a jazz trio you have three elements: typically, jazz drums, jazz piano, and jazz trumpet… there’s obviously different variations of this—saxophone, whatever… if you’re musically inclined you could attempt to beatbox with your mouth, and then you’d have the drums and you’d be a complete one-man jazz band.” [proceeds to demonstrate to the tearful screams of his victims]

But I’ve seen intentional jazz parodies. (Hans Groiner comes to mind.) Intentional parodies are musically literate enough to be deliberate about straying as far from the elements of jazz as possible, and leaving a trail of stylistic breadcrumbs to make it obvious. This fellow—well, I suppose he also offers tutorials on breakdancing and bouncing golf balls on clubs, but I’m still not convinced it’s a joke.

More likely, Austin McBride is a tone-deaf scrub who’s never heard a bar of jazz in his life. And if anything he’s doing is reflective of the general perception of what jazz sounds like—a bunch of nonsense licks and blues scales over repetitive block chords—we, as a civilization, are in a serious heap of trouble.

[Edit (9/29): Given the amount of traffic this page gets from people curious about Mr McBride, it behooves me to acknowledge that it has since become clear the whole shebang was a joke. If you are still on the fence, please consult this video, where he sports a deliberately ridiculous beatnik outfit and plays in five while counting in four.]

From New York jazz musician Henry Hey comes a pair of piano settings of this year’s Republican ticket—musical transcriptions of speech not unlike the technique that motivated Steve Reich’s Different Trains.

It appears Ms. Palin has a confident flair for the flowing rhythms of natural speech that would make Thelonious Monk proud. Her recitative on the economy, as sung to Katie Couric with impeccable enunciation:

And here she is with John McCain in a bright, vaudevillian demonstration of their appeal to down-home real America:

I visited Manhattan for the first time before and after the Orlando NSC, and one doesn’t visit Manhattan for the first time without coming back with a swarm of impressions that cling to the memory like barnacles.

Not content with restricting myself to the usual landmark-hopping tourist experience of scheduling ill-lit drive-by shootings (now in digital), I thought it would be rewarding to amble around the City That Sleeps As Much As I Do with little planning and forethought, and let adventure ambush me as it will. At times, the excursion assumed the manner of a pilgrimage. Mecca, with less ululation. This isn’t to say that I didn’t tick my way down the usual checklist—the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the more navigable corners of Central Park, a Broadway production or two—but stopping there wouldn’t have made it my New York, and like any good tourist, I populated my list of things to see with a few sentimental items, guided as always by the invisible hand of personal entitlement.

So when I wasn’t busy getting lost in more of Central Park than most New Yorkers will ever see, I went looking for Scrabble and jazz.

Insert coin to continue… »