Author Archives: howard

About howard

Wine, Physics and Song is my blog. Roughly speaking, I'm a quantum physicist, working mostly in the foundations of quantum theory, and in quantum computation and quantum information processing. My main focus recently has been understanding the nature of quantum theory by understanding how the possibilities it gives us for processing information compare to what might have been, by studying information processing in abstract mathematical frameworks, using tools like ordered linear spaces and category theory, in which not only quantum and classical theories, but all sorts of "foil" theories that don't seem to be realized in our physical world, but are illuminating to contrast with quantum theory, can be formulated. Sometimes I like to call this pursuit "mathematical science fiction".

Tete Mbambisa "Black Heroes" CD release concert, University of Cape Town

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At the showing of "Mama Goema: the Cape Town Beat in Five Movements", I was alerted by Calum MacNaughton to a concert concert by South African pianist Tete Mbambisa, celebrating the release of his new solo piano CD "Black Heroes", on April 22nd. We missed the first few numbers, as we were driving up from Cape Point after a day spent watching surfers at Muizenberg, watching penguins at the Boulder Beach unit of Table Mountain National Park, and walking to Diaz Beach and the Cape of Good Hope. And finding the school of music at UCT took a little while. What a finish to a fantastic day, though. Tete wrapped up a number with a crack rhythm section consisting of Ivan Bell on drums and Wesley Rustin on bass, and then his wife Vuyiswa Ngcwangu/uMambisa joined the band, in great voice, singing a standard whose name I've let slip, then Key Largo, then an excellent blues with refrain "I need a mellow man", really rocking the place.

It was great to talk to Calum, Gregory, and Vuyiswa at intermission, and Gregory gave me the info about the local jam Monday night jam session at Swingers' in Wetton. After intermission Tete came back on solo piano, playing a beautiful piece made up on the spot and titled "Gregory" for Gregory Franz, who has been photographing and blogging about the Cape jazz scene recently. Tete lamented the fact that since he had just made it up, he might not remember it---so he played it again. (Someone had been doing a video, so the tune is probably recorded.) More excellent solo piano including selections from the new CD, and then the rhythm section, along with saxophonist Sisonke, joined for Emavundleni, from the new CD, dedicated to his ancestors ("not mine", Tete's wife had earlier joked). Then a sanctified-sounding tune, with excellent sax work, segueing toward the end into a fantastic free-bop kind of interlude.

Mbambisa's piano style seems to me to mix mostly straight-ahead bop/hard bop with a bit of a more African sound, maybe influenced a bit by the repetition-with-slowly-evolving changes and additions of Mbira music. He has a very solid, round, ringing touch that can also be delicate when needed---and the sound he got from the Steinway (I think it was a D, the 9 foot concert grand) on stage was superb. He also has a good melodic sense, and tends to avoid cliche, often putting together short bits of melodic line in surprising but logical ways, leaving space, varying and developing rather than always running on.

A very informal concert, with very high-calibre music-making. At one point Tete was calling out the changes, teaching the bass-player one of his tunes on the spot---it sounded great as this went on, and after a chorus everything was locked in.

The last two were a slow, very pretty song, with lovely sax work, and (on the insistent request of, I think, relatives in the audience) Paul Desmond's "Take Five", the sax player sitting out. This was absolutely the most cooking version of that tune I've ever heard---with its ostinato in 5 (or a measure of 3 followed by a measure of 2) laid down in hard-rocking, hard-swinging style with changing harmonic colors, and piano lines and chordal interludes reminiscent of McCoy Tyner or mid-1960s Herbie Hancock (but all Mbambisa's) spun out over it, building a long, rollicking solo. Lines ringing out, then repeated up a half step, then punctuated by some block chords. I had never realized that Take Five was basically a hard-charging 1960s modal rave-up avant la lettre (well, barely), but Tete, playing with power but still relaxed, left no doubt about it. A fantastic closer. I bought the CD, which I will review in more detail soon; it's highly recommended and you can buy it at the link at the top of the post, and listen to excerpts here.

To wrap things up, from Youtube here's Inhlupeko from the out of print 1969 record of the same name by the Soul Jazzmen, Mbambisa on piano with Duku Makasi, saxophone, "Big T" Ntsele, bass, and Mafufu Jama, drums.

Mama Goema: the Cape Town Beat at District Six

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On April 21 I caught a screening of "Mama Goema: The Cape Town Beat in Five Movements", at the District Six Museum in Cape Town.  Here's the trailer:

Part of a hip-hop film festival (schedule and more here), which casts its net rather broadly, including the musical roots of Cape Town hip-hop.  Two of the three directors, Sara Gouveia and Calum MacNaughton, were present for a Q&A session after the screening, as was musician Hilton Schilder.  Goema seems to be a type of drum, and a type of music growing from certain musical traditions of the Cape Carnival, but exactly what it is appears to be a bit fluid.  Calum is quoted in Cape Town Magazine saying "Carnival culture is the Goema blueprint and Cape Jazz is its link to modern sound..."  Possibly, it's especially associated with a certain beat, found also in some Brazilian carnival music, as claimed here. Common influences on Brazilian and Cape Carnival culture and music can, I think, be ascribed in part to connections between the two areas via the slave trade. The Cape Carnival is more commonly known as Kaapse Klopse, or---no offense intended, this is one of the most common local names for it---the Coon Carnival. The latter name may derive from the strong influence of minstrel troupes---whether black or white in blackface is not clear---that visited Cape Town in the late 19th or early 20th century. Besides the Carnival music and dancing, there were a couple of revelations for me in the movie---firstly,  the music of Xhosa musician Madosini (who was participating in a performance of a Goema symphony by Mac MacKenzie, and was further featured in the film to represent black African influences on Cape music), and secondly, the music of The Genuines, a 1980s thrash/pop/rock/jazz group of which keyboardist Hilton Schilder and bassist Mac MacKenzie were members and vocalists.

I talked with Hilton and Calum a bit after the event. Calum hipped me to Tete Mbambisa's CD release concert the next day at the University of Cape Town. You can stream---or better, buy---the music Hilton and Mac made with the Genuines at their bandcamp.com page.  Here's their track "Goema" from the album of the same name:

Into Africa

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It's always romantic and exciting to travel to a continent I've never been to before.  Even in the waiting area at the airport in Atlanta, whence Delta runs a direct flight to Johannesburg, there's a sense of already being partway there: overheard conversations in what must be Afrikaans; in some native African language; in English in an accent that's somehow clearly southern-hemisphere, but not Australian.  People of all the variety of races or ethnicities that  make up South Africa's population.  Blond boys and girls with ruddy-cheeked parents, who have clearly been on Caribbean beach vacations.   Black men who dress, and carry themselves, with a subtly different style from Americans; black African women whose style seems partly derived from traditional dress. Then, ten or so hours and several movies into a thirteen-and-half hour overnight transatlantic marathon flight, to raise the shade on the aircraft window to find oneself crossing the surf-line of the coast of Namibia far below, a few cottony bits of low cloud or fog clinging to the coastline as the sun beats down on them, demarcating the vivid blue of the Atlantic from the coppery sands of the Namibian desert, which displays under the clear blue sky of morning patterns of what look like darker sands and braided washes draining away, it seems, from the coast.  Desert summits that are like dark, stepped ziggurats.  Unclear whether the steps are due to sedimentary layering, or basaltic flows.  They remind in some ways of the dark volcanic summits west of Albuquerque, and in the Puerco river basin northwest of it, but the forms are distinct.  Further ranges in duns and reddish browns, flat expanses of sand.  Then an amazing circular formation that must be many miles in diameter, looking like a palisade of slab-like mountains, tilted in toward the center, surrounding a flat central plain.  Is it some kind of collapsed salt formation, like Utah's Upheaval Dome?

The landscape gets less dramatic, reddish dirt sparsely and then less sparsely covered with a green scrub, and a few widely spaced roads show up, first dirt, then even a paved road and a few scattered houses and ranches as we pass northwest of Windhoek, probably just out of sight in a valley beyond a reservoir.  Greener, hillier, but still scrubby as we pass over the border with Botswana, across Botswana just south of the Kalahari, finally sighting the Notwane river far below and then the capital Gaborone, mainly industrial and transport buildings and yards on our side of the airplane, also the large lake created by Gaborone dam.   Not far beyond the river, we cross the border into South Africa.

Descending into Johannesburg, the great township of Soweto just out of sight to the south, or hidden by the scattered clouds, we see mainly nondescript suburbs, a huge football stadium, then as we descend further what could pass for modest suburbs of say, Phoenix, golf courses and parks, fairly comfortable and new-looking neighborhoods, open fields, looking fairly moist and green, traffic on expressways then a wedge of bright African colors, especially blue, that I realize with a jolt is a small collection of painted corrugated iron shacks, here and then gone as the enormous jet touches down, finally, at Oliver Tambo International Airport.

Stiglitz likes South African infrastructure investment plans

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Since I'm in South Africa this month as a Fellow of the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study (about which more later), I came across this interesting article from a main South African paper, Business Day, about Joseph Stiglitz' involvement in South African economic issues.  According to the article he "voiced strong support for the government’s R840bn infrastructure programme, which he said could create a "virtuous circle" of investment and growth and set SA on the path to a more productive and equal society."  (Link added.) 840 billion rand is 108 billion US dollars at today's rate.  That is roughly 25% of South African nominal GDP as forecast for 2012, but this article, also in Business Day, refers to it as a 20-year rolling program, in which case it is on the order of 1% of GDP annually, depending on the spending profile, future GDP growth, and how the total nominal value of R850bn in planned spending is calculated.  Also interesting is the plan to finance it with mandatory retirement plan savings; while there are probably further details, it sounds on the face of it similar to a social-security type plan.  However it lacks, one suspects, the (rather inappropriate, in my view) feature of US social security as currently (but rather recently, in historic terms) formulated, of being officially described as a trust fund invested entirely in central government securities.  From the second Business Day article cited above:

In the final session of the conference, business leader Bobby Godsell and Zwelinzima Vavi, general secretary of the Congress of South African Trade Unions, both made guarded commitments to this. Mr Godsell said a society-wide discussion was needed on the concept of "a reasonable return" for investment, while Mr Vavi said he backed plans to introduce mandatory savings for all employees.

This sounds like how it should be done.

I have picked up a widespread sense that there is a lot of corruption and siphoning off of funds in the awarding and performance of goverment contracts in South Africa.  Obviously a big infrastructure programme provides big opportunities for more of this, which can of course be damaging economically and perhaps even more, politically; I suspect, and certainly hope, Stiglitz has factored in this aspect of the South African scene, and still thinks the plan worthwhile but it would be interesting to see it addressed directly as it is certainly not a minor issue.

Thrift store LP finds: Albinoni oboe from de Vries, Mozart from Radu Lupu

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I've been down a rabbit hole of differential geometry and representation theory, as well as doing some work on a review article with a collaborator lately, so apologies for the posting hiatus.

A quick note on weekend listening: I picked up an EMI/Angel LP (SZ-37802) of Albinoni oboe concertos Nos. 2, 5, 8, and 11 for a buck at a thrift shop. Han de Vries, soloist, with Alma Musica Amsterdam, produced in 1981. Bob van Asperen, harpsichord, is billed just after de Vries, so perhaps this is a harpsichordist-led ensemble.  Very pleasing listening---I got a good copy with very little surface noise and distortion. The sound is reminiscent of 1970s and early 80s Phillips LPs (like the Marriner/ Academy of St. Martin in the Fields Musical Offering)---a slight, but not excessive thinness, but more liquidity and sweetness, good detail and separation of instruments---a reasonable soundstage if not a huge sense of room acoustics.  The music is excellent, not the world's deepest and most intense stuff, but melodic, at times dancing, and very assured writing.  Nothing really breaking out of baroque conventions (although I'm not hugely up on baroque musical history, and Albinoni, along with Vivaldi, Telemann, and Handel, may well have been establishing said conventions here), but very poised and graceful writing, with a lot of low-key melodic interest to lift it well above generic baroque.  Superb playing from oboeist and orchestra both, to my ear.

One of my favorite pianists, Radu Lupu, playing Mozart concertos Nos. 21 in C and 12 with the English Chamber Orchestra and Uri Segal (London LP CS 6894, from 1974) is also sounding great, a slightly noisier copy but no problems with the music.  Another excellent recording job---really good piano tone, a slightly more midrangy balance than the above, to judge by the strings, well-captured bass.   But in general, in the same ballpark of slightly-on-the-lush-side, detailed but sweet sound that some of the major classical labels seem to have locked onto in the late 70s and early 80s, especially with chamber to moderate-sized orchestral ensembles.  Easy to hear what's going in each part of the orchestra, and to separate the soloist from the orchestra.  Is it a natural soundstage, or is the piano closely miked?  Who knows... who cares.  I love Radu Lupu's playing on this.  Relaxed, lyrical, but not exaggeratedly so.  Fantastic touch as always, and sensitivity to nuances in the music.  His work in the brilliant arpeggiated passages is, perhaps surprisingly, as nuanced and singing as the more cantabile passages, and fantastically accurate and rhythmically perfectly placed, while remaining unstrained and natural.  The orchestra is superb and superbly conducted---able to provide drama when needed without excessive Sturm und Drang.  And that's just the first movement of No. 21 so far... now here comes Lupu on the melody of the sublime second movement, Andante... not surprisingly, magic.  Not as heart-on-the-sleeve as some renditions of this classic slow movement can be... but none the less moving for that.  Just beautiful.  (This is some of the deepest and most intense stuff around.)  I've long loved Lupu's Schubert... marveled at his Debussy at a concert in Santa Fe a few years back... and now I'm a big fan of his Mozart.  One of the truly great pianists.

Europe again

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C. Fred Bergsten and Jacob Kierkegaard think Europe will pull things together and the Euro will not collapse. The frequent crises there in the last year derive from a game of "chicken" by actors trying to stick each other with as much as possible of the cost of averting a collapse; all actors recognize that whatever fraction they end up bearing, the cost to them of doing what it takes to prevent collapse, is much less than the cost of collapse, they say.

At The Monkey Cage, it's pointed out that games of chicken sometimes end badly. I think Bergsten and Kierkegaard are quite aware of this, but it's interesting that they think it's unlikely to happen in this instance. Their advice regarding Euro zone leaders, to "watch what they do, not what they say" is clearly worth remembering, as the events and words leading up to the ECB action on credit via European banks indicate.

For me, the threat of an actual collapse of the Euro, or of the European banking system, diminished greatly when the ECB proffered its three-year loans of 450 billion or so Euros to European banks last December. The banks used some of it to buy Euro area sovereign bonds (Bergsten and Kierkegaard claim that they were under pressure from the ECB to do that; I've read elsewhere that these bonds were actually required as collateral, but I don't have the source handy so can't vouch for it). What bothers me most about their analysis is that while mentioning optimal currency area theory, they don't go into it in any depth. A key point, to which they give some but perhaps not enough attention, is the imbalance in terms of trade caused by areas with very different cost structures, such as Portugal, Spain, and even Italy, sharing a currency with Germany. They seem to think that "structural reforms", especially of the labor market, will fix that. In fact, in their reading (and also in that of many opponents of Euro area austerity and ECB's relatively tight monetary policies) a main goal of the ECB is to get such structural---and political, if necessary---change in some of the Euro area countries. I think they underestimate the difficult of getting this done---especially if it goes hand in hand with "austerity". They do recognize the need for growth:

Even the most successful financial engineering in the euro
area will ultimately fail, however, if the debtor countries,
and indeed the region as a whole, are unable to restore at
least modest economic growth in the fairly near future. This
requires at least three major steps:
* The borrowing countries must adopt convincing progrowth
structural reforms, especially in their labor
markets, as well as budgetary austerity.
* The strong economies in the northern core of Europe,
especially Germany, must terminate their own fiscal
consolidations for a while and adopt new expansionary
measures, i.e., they should buy more Italian and Greek
goods and services rather than debt instruments.
* The ECB must promptly reduce its policy interest rate
by at least another 50 basis points and buy sufficient
amounts of periphery bonds through the SMP to help
push their interest rates down to sustainable levels.

Do they really have confidence that to save the Euro Germany will loosen its fiscal policy enough to create a significant boost to the European "periphery" from trade, and that the ECB will loosen monetary policy enough to offset their prescribed austerity in the periphery, and boost Euro periphery growth (from trade and from credit availability)? I guess they are saying that they do. There's a lot of room for political turmoil here if it doesn't happen this way, and what current heads of state and Euro institution leaders think may in that case not end up being the determining factor. Also, EU leaders will is one thing, but many actors' notions of "expansionary austerity" seem to be rooted in a misunderstanding of economic dynamics. ECB president Draghi's background is somewhat reassuring here, but he's not the only actor, and even he seems to be playing off a willingness to do macro stabilization against other goals of political and economic reform.

Regarding the budget rules that are part of the new fiscal institution building Bergsten and Kierkegaard are so partial to, conservative (but reality-based) economist Martin Feldstein on European austerity is worried: How to Create a Depression contains as good a description as any of the Keynesian (or neo-Keynesian, if you like, in the sense of post-WWII US macroeconomics) notion of automatic fiscal stabilization.

Feldstein does not succumb to the temptation that attracts many right-wing hacks (he, of course, is not a hack), and even many proudly centrist folk (including hacks) who are not terribly well informed on economics, to take all Eurozone deficits as evidence of fiscal irresponsiblility:

Italy, Spain, and France all have deficits that exceed 3% of GDP. But these are not structural deficits, and financial markets would be better informed and reassured if the ECB indicated the size of the real structural deficits and showed that they are now declining. For investors, that is the essential feature of fiscal solvency.

An important part of the deficit agreement in December is that member states may run cyclical deficits that exceed 0.5% of GDP – an important tool for offsetting declines in demand. And it is unclear whether the penalties for total deficits that exceed 3% of GDP would be painful enough for countries to sacrifice greater countercyclical fiscal stimulus.

The most frightening recent development is a formal complaint by the European Central Bank that the proposed rules are not tough enough. Jorg Asmussen, a key member of the ECB’s executive board, wrote to the negotiators that countries should be allowed to exceed the 0.5%-of-GDP limit for deficits only in times of “natural catastrophes and serious emergency situations” outside the control of governments.

Perhaps this is just part of the game of chicken. Certainly it's heartening that the December ECB agreeement does explicitly distinguish between structural and cyclical sources of deficits, and foresee a role for automatic fiscal stabilization through cyclical deficits. But one worries: to what extent does Asmussen represent a broader consensus at the ECB, and what will they do---how long will they drag things out, how tight will they keep money---to try to get their way. And what would be the consequences if they do? Is the economic story of the Eurozone for the next decade or two going to be a continuing game of chicken, accompanied by stagnation? Will this be politically tenable?

Thoughts on the evolution of technology-using intelligence

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A few more thoughts inspired by Tim Maudlin's remarks in an interview with the Atlantic magazine. I'll quote Tim again first:

The question remains as to how often, after life evolves, you'll have intelligent life capable of making technology. What people haven't seemed to notice is that on earth, of all the billions of species that have evolved, only one has developed intelligence to the level of producing technology. Which means that kind of intelligence is really not very useful. It's not actually, in the general case, of much evolutionary value. We tend to think, because we love to think of ourselves, human beings, as the top of the evolutionary ladder, that the intelligence we have, that makes us human beings, is the thing that all of evolution is striving toward. But what we know is that that's not true. Obviously it doesn't matter that much if you're a beetle, that you be really smart. If it were, evolution would have produced much more intelligent beetles. We have no empirical data to suggest that there's a high probability that evolution on another planet would lead to technological intelligence. There is just too much we don't know.

Certainly it is remarkable that only one technology-using (if you discount a few cases of the most rudimentary use of natural objects, and perhaps a few cases of very rudimentarily modified objects, as tools by other animals) species has evolved on Earth. An interesting question is whether most planets that do evolve life eventually evolve species that produce and use complex technology, and how many such species. My guess, certainly not supported by long consideration, but by a modest amount of offhand thought, is that given enough time, they do. My guess is also that it takes a fair amount of time for evolution to produce such a species, and that this is part of an overall evolution towards increasing complexity, in some sense I'll here leave ill-defined, of the overall web of life on the planet, and in particular, of the most complex species on the planet. (Perhaps the notions of complexity explored by Charles Bennett, Murray Gell-Mann, and Seth Lloyd may be relevant.) Since the environment in which organisms must survive and propagate evolution consists in significant measure of other organisms, evolution itself creates new niches in this environment for organisms to evolve toward filling. As Robinson Jeffers wrote:

What but the wolf’s tooth whittled so fine
The fleet limbs of the antelope?
What but fear winged the birds, and hunger
Jewelled with such eyes the great goshawk’s head?

While I don't see a clear and obvious argument for it offhand, it is plausible to me that this process tends over time to create more and more complexity. In this sense, I suspect there is "progress" in evolution, despite a fair amount of scoffing in some quarters at the notion of evolutionary progress. This looks like a fruitful area for research. It's also plausible that this sort of evolutionary progress may eventually create both a niche for, and an accessible evolutionary path towards, a technology-using intelligent species. Whether the fact that we have only a single such species on this planet is due primarily to their being essentially only one niche for such a species, to the fact that it takes a long time for such a species to evolve due to the many precursor steps necessary (this would need to be a rather tricky anthropic argument, I suspect), or just happenstance, seems even more speculative, but very interesting.

So it seems to me I find myself supporting, at least speculatively, what may seem the naive, knee-jerk view "that the intelligence we have, that makes us human beings, is the thing that all of evolution is striving toward". With allowance for a metaphorical use of "striving", and modification of the definite article ("the thing"), I'm not too unhappy with that characterization. How far things go beyond "the intelligence we have", though, I'm not prepared to say. And it may be that there are very different paths for a planetary ecosystem to take, other than the production of one (or a few?) technology-using species. As Tim says, in the end we really don't know. But I do think there is interesting knowledge to be sought here.

Tim Maudlin on the training of physicists, the evolution of intelligence, and more

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I had to link this interview with philosopher Tim Maudlin, in the Atlantic, when I read his observation that "The asking of fundamental physical questions is just not part of the training of a physicist anymore." But there's a lot more of interest in the interview as well. I found the article via Andrew Sullivan's blog; Sullivan found Tim's thoughts on the evolution of intelligence to be particularly interesting:

What people haven't seemed to notice is that on earth, of all the billions of species that have evolved, only one has developed intelligence to the level of producing technology. Which means that kind of intelligence is really not very useful. It's not actually, in the general case, of much evolutionary value. We tend to think, because we love to think of ourselves, human beings, as the top of the evolutionary ladder, that the intelligence we have, that makes us human beings, is the thing that all of evolution is striving toward. But what we know is that that's not true. Obviously it doesn't matter that much if you're a beetle, that you be really smart. If it were, evolution would have produced much more intelligent beetles. We have no empirical data to suggest that there's a high probability that evolution on another planet would lead to technological intelligence. There is just too much we don't know.

Indeed there is, but it points out some very interesting questions: is there a tendency, given enough time, for a species intelligent enough to produce technology to arise on an earth-like planet? Is there, perhaps, a tendency for it to inhibit the evolution of other such species? My personal guess (and it's just that, a guess, not supported by careful thought) is that there is such a tendency, but it takes a lot of time, it builds on, and is part of, a slow increase in the complexity of the most complex organisms. This is, of course, probably the "knee-jerk" view. Whether it inhibits the evolution of other species is something I'm less willing to speculate on (though if Neanderthals were another such species, we may have some evidence (one case!) for inhibition of the branching of a potentially technologically-capable intelligent species into two such species). Whether vertebrates have characteristics making it more likely for them to evolve technologically-capable intelligence than it is for, say, insects to evolve it is another interesting question.

Stravinsky's "Les Noces" (Svadebka) on Hyperion (Voronezh, New London)

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I finally listened to my Hyperion CD of a 1990 recording of Stravinsky's "Les Noces" (Svadebka, The Wedding), with the New London Chamber Choir and Ensemble, directed by James Wood, and The Voronezh Chamber Choir, directed by Oleg Shepel. Stunning. I knew this work previously through the Bernstein/English Bach Festival Orchestra and Choir version on Deutsche Grammophon.  In that version, I found it an interesting work, but a bit hard to sit through the whole thing repeatedly.  Bernstein's version emphasized the percussive aspects.  I probably was moved to buy the Hyperion version by composer John Adams' praise for it on his blog, Hellmouth.  The NL/Voronezh version is much more nuanced and for me, balances percussiveness and aggression better with lyricism.  It has superb sound overall, with a fairly realistic, broad and deep soundstage and good hall atmospherics.  I'm not completely sure how naturally it was achieved---there are either drummers on each side of the stage, or the drums were recorded with multiple mikes and mixed with excessive stereo separation of the different drums, but it sounds good overall.  Very sweet and clear instrumental timbres, and extremely good resolution of accompanying instruments allowing subtle details of the piece to be heard.  I found some of the higher female voices to sound a bit thin and perhaps distorted at times (could be my system, or an issue with microphone preamps (distortion) or with mixing or even the actual voices (thinness)).  But overall the quality of the voices and singing, and the recording of them, is excellent.

Musically, the piece sounds like it could have been a predecessor, rather than, as it actually was, a successor, to the Rite of Spring.  It provides a more relaxed, less avant-garde setting than Rite for exploring the folk-music-based modes, and the percussiveness and somewhat dissonant chord extensions, and the occasional use of multiple modal melodies in dissonant counterpoint, that provide a lot of the musical language of Rite.  Even before reading it in the liner notes, you sense that the often arranged, and highly ritualized, Russian peasant weddings being portrayed, are a less extreme analog of the sacrifice in Rite, though with less predictably dire results, from a modern point of view.  And in the hands of this ensemble, the piece's goal of portraying the human drama of such an event (or at least, the version Stravinsky wants us to experience), is fully achieved.  Though similarities to Rite are there, the texture and mood are overall quite different.  I'd earlier not thought Noces to be even nearly on the level of the great triumvirate of Firebird, Petrushka, and the Rite, but on the strength of this recording, I now think it's close.

9.5 overall for this CD on my 10 point scale that goes to 11.

 

 

John Rangel / Michael Anthony ---- jazz duet at El Meson, Santa Fe

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El Meson has excellent tapas and excellent live music, often jazz, in its bar and jazz room, ¡Chispa!.  (I've never eaten in the main dining room.)  For a long time Thursdays were given over to local pianist John Rangel (who moved to Santa Fe a few years back from Los Angeles) playing duets with different guest musicians.  I've enjoyed John's playing in a variety of settings, and I heard him with Albuquerque-based guitarist Michael Anthony (another LA transplant with lots of film recording credits to his name) last Nov. 17 (2011).  It was a very enjoyable evening of jazz, with the musicians playing close attention to each other and creating different moods and interludes on the fly.  Exchanges of "fours" and such were especially interesting.  I didn't take notes, and a run-through would be pointless anyway, but the repertoire was a lot of standards, jazz classics, some bossa and samba, and blues.   Fairly straightahead bop and post bop, played with a sophisticated harmonic sense and plenty of chromaticism on the part of both players, but nothing too far-out.  I definitely recommend going to any gig John is playing on... he is frequently to be heard with the Tribute Trio (w/ Michael Glynn on bass, Cal Haines on drums), either on their own or with guest horn players.

Tapas at El Meson are often superb---the Cordoban style fried eggplant ($9.50) is very fresh-tasting, almost sweet, and practically melts in your mouth---it is especially good in late summer when eggplant is in season, but always worthwhile.  House-roasted peppers in a little earthenware terrine with Spanish goat cheese ($7.50) are also superb.  I like fried oysters with Romesco sauce ($9.50) as well.  Setas a la Parilla ($9.50), oyster mushrooms grilled with garlic, parsley, and olive oil, are also excellent, if less exotic.   The sherries by the glass have all been excellent as well.

Highly recomended for both food and music.