Due to a catastrophic Windows failure last weekend, I have lost the email addresses of anyone who has written to me. If you’d like to hear from me, please feel free to email me here.

Jazz fans need to run out and pick up the incredible new release from the John Coltrane estate, One Up, One - Live at the Half Note, a live release overseen by Coltrane’s talented son, saxophonist Ravi Coltrane (whose new album, In Flux, comes HIGHLY recommended as well - one of the best new jazz releases of the year.) This is not “easy” music by any means - what you hear on this set is Coltrane developing ideas, and in that sense it’s truly fascinating. As other notable musicians note in the liner, the solo of the title track is one of his most important musical statements, a piece that has been sought out by jazz afficiados for decades and existed only as shoddy many-generations degraded copies-of-copies. This is definitely not something you’ll want to put on during a polite dinner but rather something that needs careful, close listening to really grasp what’s going on. The compositions here form a bridge between Coltrane’s later, wilder work and his more standard-based music of the earlier 60s. As Ravi and others point out in the liner notes, this is music that existed only in the moment, and no one has quite managed to capture whatever it is that Coltrane was able to let free here.

The sound quality is overall excellent, but the buyer should be aware that these tapes are not perfect - there are occasional dropouts in the right channel - but the music contained within is so superb that any audio issues are a distant concern.

On top of the Emmy awards and nominations, the critics’ undying love, and a small but ravenous legion of fans, Arrested Development now has one more beautiful achievement to parade around: it is one of the many Fox shows that top a list of TV programming that a parents group deems distasteful. The fact that it’s not #1 shows that they didn’t even watch the show - no other program on TV has gotten away with a line like Tobias’ recent outburst “I can just taste the meaty leading man parts in my mouth!” and repeated mentions in season 2 of how he “blue himself.” If they missed that or somehow didn’t think it was offensive, perhaps the show really is too subtly subversive. Either way, congratulations, Arrested Development! You know what they say about “bad” publicity . . . let’s hope it really is true.

Having nothing else of value to post at the moment, why not duplicate the rousing success of my first “randomMonday” post last week? “Random shuffle” posts seem to be a “Friday thing” but, really, Monday deserves some special attention. randoMonday it is!

1. King Crimson: “Easy Money” (King Crimson Collector’s Club #29, Live in Heidelberg, March 29, 1974
2. Bruce Cockburn: “Trickle Down” (You’ve Never Seen Everything)
3. XTC: “Snowman (live)” (Coat of Many Cupboards, disc 2)
4. Bruce Cockburn: “Celestial Horses” (You’ve Never Seen Everything)
5. Charlie Hunter: “Changui” (Right Now Live (DVD rip))
6. The White Stripes: “Red Rain” (Get Behind Me Satan)
7. Bill Frisell: “Rag” (Live)
8. King Crimson: “Radio I” (Thrak)
9. Bill Bruford’s Earthworks: “Nerve” (All Heaven Broke Loose)
10. Bill Frisell: “Avulet” (Masada Guitars)

Hmm, not a whole lot of variety going on there. So goes the mystery of Ipod’s “random” shuffle.

I’ve been doing a lot of really intense listening to King Crimson lately, having just created a “Crimson family” Smart Playlist for my Ipod. Being the die-hard, geeky fan that I am (proven by the fact that I make a playlist just for this) I was really intrigued to find out that I have around 1100 songs that relate in some physical way to the band King Crimson - whether they be actually by the band itself or they are other projects involving members of the band (of which there are many - so many I’m not even close to having all of them, nor am I even trying,) and, of course, many live versions due to the many official bootlegs. That’s well over 8 gigabytes of music surrounding one loosely structured group of musicians. To put it another way, I have 66 CDs of strictly King Crimson content, meaning the band known in, what, 8 or 10 incarnations at this point, as well as some direct offshoots (the four ProjeKcts have 9 discs just by themselves!) - this does not include many of the peripheral groups and just-plain solo recordings of the band’s members. I’m simply stunned.

In revisiting King Crimson this week, I became fascinated again with the opening track off of their 1995 album, Thrak, one of my favorite albums of all time. What’s so intriguing about this track is that it’s essentially two songs in one - one in the left channel and one in the right. This incarnation of King Crimson is the “double trio” - basically, two small bands that work together. The rumored original intent for Thrak was to be an album comprised of songs that featured one band in one channel and the other in the other channel. Alas, that was not to be, and “VROOOM” is the only song that really worked out well this way (as far as I can tell - there may be elements of other songs on the album that work separately in each channel.) Thus, the two halves of “VROOOM” are markedly different when you isolate them - having distinctly different beats and such, but functioning together as a perfect whole. Instead of having to change the balance or remove an ear plug, I decided to create a mono track for each channel. You, gentle reader, benefit, as for a short time I’m offering the fruits of my two minutes of work. I’m even including the original song, edited to remove a slow build at the beginning, for comparison. For those wanting to keep really good notes, the “left channel mix” showcases guitarist Robert Fripp, Stick player Trey Gunn (who is mixed very low, unfortunately, but if you strain you can make out his parts from Fripp’s - just think about what a low-tuned guitar would sound like) and drummer Pat Mastelotto. The “right channel mix” is guitarist Adrian Belew, bassist Tony Levin (whose upright bass work can be heard in the bridge of the song in both channels,) and drummer Bill Bruford.

King Crimson: “Thrak (original)” (5.82 mb, 192kbps mp3)
King Crimson: “Thrak (left channel mix)” (5.82 mb, 192kbps mp3)
King Crimson: “Thrak (right channel mix)” (5.82 mb, 192kbps mp3)

If you know me, you know I’m an unapologetically die-hard Rush fan, as is Alissa. I’ve known about their new DVD that celebrates their 30th anniversary with a show taped last year in Frankfurt, Germany, R30, but I’m very excited to see news of a “deluxe edition”. (Does anything not come out in “deluxe edition” anymore? But I digress . . . ) Included in this deluxe edition are two audio CDs of the show (which is great because I won’t have to rip my DVD to listen to the show) and “various goodies.” I’d assume the packaging will be more extravagant, too - and much better sound mixing than Rush In Rio. As incredible of a show that was, the sound was pretty muddled, unfortunately. Let’s hope those Germans don’t sing along with every song - including the instrumentals, which, I admit, is entertaining to hear on Rush In Rio, but I’d gladly give that up for crystal-clear sound.

What should be really fun is seeing the career-spanning documentary that includes footage from the way-back machine that Geddy says “are kind of painful to watch! Bad hair, bad glasses. You just kind of look in wonderment like, ‘Is that really me?’” Because one of the fun things about being a Rush fan is being able to look back at the various fashions the band fell victim to - robes in the 70s, skinny ties in the 80s, etc.

November 22, the release date, can’t come soon enough.

Cue up the Ipod (or whatever you losers who don’t have Ipods use,) hit “shuffle” and list:

1. Pelican: “-” (this should be a bullet but shows up all screwy) The Fire In Our Throats Will Beckon the Thaw
2. Bill Frisell: “The Beach” In Line
3. Wilco: “Kicking Television” A Ghost Is Born bonus EP
4. Grant Green: “Oleo (Alternate Version)” The Complete Quartets with Sonny Clark
5. Rush: “Natural Science (Live)” Rush In Rio
6. Death Cab For Cutie: “Your Heart Is An Empty Room” Plans
7. Sugar: “A Good Idea” Copper Blue
8. Bill Frisell: “We Are Everywhere” The Intercontinentals
9. The Pernice Brothers: “Pisshole In The Snow” Discover A Lovelier You
10. Bill Bruford: “The Wooden Man Sings, And The Stone Woman Dances” Footloose And Fancy Free
11. Brendan Benson: “Get It Together” The Alternative To Love

Jazz fans might want to head over to saxophonist Greg Osby’s site, specifically his mp3 page where you can download a huge amount of professionally recorded official live recordings from him and his band - all mp3s, no DRM. My only complaint would be his use of 128kbps quality mp3s - that’s just a tad too low, especially for jazz. But free is free, so my complaint is rendered null and void.

Hope you “enjoy(ed) . . . Monday’s episode. Chances are, everything after that will be dubbed ‘the lost episodes’ on the next DVD.” Seriously, people, what the hell do I have to do to get you to watch?

For those as addicted to Lost as I am, this season has already offered up a huge number of weird things going on - no surprise there. (I’m not even going to try to begin explaining for those who haven’t caught up yet - you go Google Lost and do that yourself. Believe me, you’ll find plenty to help you.) What is a surprise is this “Dharma Initiative” symbol seems to contain a message. Some point out that it’s I Ching but, from what I see in the information presented on that site, there should be more to this for it to mean anything.

So maybe there’s more going on here. There are three rings of lines in an octagon shape around the inner part of the symbol. They’re not solid rings, however - some are long and others are two shorter lines. I kept looking at this and realized that it may actually be Morse code. Here’s the image:

The three rings break down like this:

Outer ring:
_ . . _ _ . . . . _ . .

Middle ring:
. . . . _ _ _ . . . . _

Inner Ring:
_ . . . . _ . . _ . . _

And here’s Morse code: http://www.babbage.demon.co.uk/morseabc.html

The problem is that there’s no way to tell whether you’re looking at, for example, “_” or “_ . .” - nor is there any guarantee that starting at the top and working your way around, then repeating for the next two rings, is actually the start of the message. It could start at the far left, or . . . ? (I did, however, rule out the possibility that the code is stacked - three rows of symbols for each face of the octagon - because there is no Morse that has six dots.)

I haven’t really done much looking on the many Lost sites since I figured this out last night, but I didn’t see anyone mention this on the ones that I did look at.

But who knows. It probably just says “Be sure to drink your Ovaltine.”