Happy Birthday Ron Carter!

Today is Ron Carter's 72nd birthday. I've always been a huge Ron Carter fan. I love his phrasing and his ability to choose notes and rhythms in a walking bass line that literally drive the line forward, embedding a song with an emotional foundation.

I recently read his biography (by Dan Ouellette). I've thought about writing a review of the book, but have avoided it. Overall, I liked the book, but the book never grabbed my like other biographies and autobiographies (e.g., those of Wayne Shorter, John Coltrane, Miles Davis). At times, the book painted Mr. Carter as a bit of a curmudgeon who feels slighted by his position in the jazz community. Many years ago I had the opportunity to see a masterclass by Mr. Carter and had a short conversation with him (maybe five minutes). The masterclass demonstrated his incredible technique and his desire to help others. In the conversation, he was friendly, kind and funny. The book tells a great story, but I felt it left out some of the story of Ron Carter. At times, the book seems like a laundry list of recordings and accomplishments, without telling the story of Ron.

Peter Tambroni's edition of Bottessini's Elegy

To celebrate his 100th post on MostlyBass.com, Peter Tambroni has made his edition of Bottessini's Elegy available free for download. This offer expires on April 3rd so you better move fast.

Sound in Motion (David McGill)

I recently finished reading Sound in Motion by David McGill. This is a great book. Originally written for wind players, the book discusses the fine points of phrasing and performance. The central theme on phrasing generally follows that put forth in Thurmond's Note Groupings, but in a more enjoyable and clear presentation. My read on McGill's directive of putting motion in your playing is that one should focus on grouping notes much as one groups words into sentences when speaking. In doing so, one must not look to the bar lines as indicating the end of a phrase (just as one would not look to the end of a line of written text when grouping words into sentences), but to the natural completion of the musical idea. In Thurmond's book, he focuses the reader/player on looking at the upbeats in a phrase as indicating the demarcation points of phrases and notes that should be emphasized. McGill presents this idea in a more illustrative way, with many clear examples.

As a bassist who spends most of his time accompanying others with walking lines, I found McGill's book an enjoyable and insightful read. After having finished the book, I tried to implement some of the ideas in the coarsest form: at a gig I tried guiding my playing by playing the root on the down beat of each phrase (I was playing with a jump blues group) and used the rest of the bar to phrase a line that moved towards the next chord. This a musical phrase was not walking over a chord, but rather a series of notes that brought me to the start of a new chord. This did not always mean playing other notes in the chords. In fact, I tried to avoid playing the other notes in the chord by focusing exclusively on creating a series of notes (starting on the second beat of the measure) which formed a complete phrase ending on the root of the next measure (first beat of subsequent measure).

The results were mixed. While the guys in the band commented that I sounded great that night (a noteworthy event as these guys are pretty short on complements) there were some grinder blues numbers that it did not work. In retrospect, I know why... and should have known at the time. That said, the gig was a success: I got a complement from the band, learned something, nobody got hurt, nothing got broken.

Eric Wilson's Against Happiness

I've been reading Eric Wilson's book Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy. I picked it up because several of the people in the research group I of which I am a member conduct research on subjective well-being (i.e., happiness). There is no shortage of criticisms regarding the search on positive psychology and happiness (for example, read this and this), and I myself have my own criticisms of this approach to studying economic policy.

Wilson's book, I hoped, would offer some interesting insights. Personally, my concerns with happiness studies are in part motivated by a framing effect that seemed right along the lines in Wilson's book. I think framing people's lives in terms of how happy they are can get people to think about the normative concept of how happy they should be. As a result, many people will feel unhappy as an artifact of not begin as happy as they should be. Since the pursuit of happiness motivates behavior, we should be concerned about giving people the wrong frame of reference or making salient benchmarks that should be irrelevant to current decision making. It's one thing to look at the income distribution and learn that you fall below median, it may quite another to learn that you fall below median happiness. That said, I'm not against studying the data we have on subjective well-being, I just think the results need to be interpreted (and implemented into policy analysis) with a great deal of caution.

This is what I hoped Wilson's book would deliver. Unfortunately, from my perspective, Wilson's book is a discussion of the melancholy in literature, particularly romantic literature. He talks about the power of feeling melancholy and how this is motivated great artists from Beethoven (who suffered from a "melancholy almost as great an evil as the other elements;" page 123) to John Lennon (Wilson's discussion of Lennon's melancholy starts with Yoko Ono; page 135).

As a result of perhaps poor product placement, this book has received a lot of negative reviews. (Here's Garrison Keillor's from the NYT.) So many that Wilson has responded, pointing out that people are looking at his book as something that it is not. It is an analysis of the melancholy from a literary perspective; it is not an argument or a case against happiness in research, as a policy tool, of in everyday life. We'll leave those arguments to others (for example, here, here, and here).

Diagnosing Autism

Here's an interesting article from CNN, mainly for parents needing help getting a proper diagnosis of their children with respect to autistic behavior. I think the article is good, but worry sometime about the potential for over-reaction. In some sense, I worry the article makes it easy for parents to see "autism" as a label to explain certain behaviors that could be attributable to other causes.

Reading this article made me think of some other incidents I've experienced when autism makes the popular press:

1. When The Curious Incident About the Dog in the Night came out, everyone recommended it to me. Some even asked if my son was like the kid in the book. I never read the book. At the time I was reading a lot of books for parents and clinical work on autism and therapy techniques. I couldn't handle reading about autism for fun. (Some people actually recommended it to me as a "fun read" since I had a son with autism.)
2. Jenny McCarthy's book about her son is (from what I've been told) a quick and easy read. However, most parents who read the book then spend lots of time looking at various diets and other "non-traditional" approaches to treatment. While these are potential sources of benefits, my experience has been that the benefits from these are (for most individuals) on the margin of the greater benefits obtained through one-on-one therapy and interactions. My worry with this kind of book is that it suggests a "cure" for autism which may distract parents form the daily needs and regular therapy an autistic child requires. I think its important to remember that Jenny McCarthy has a lot of resources (i.e., money) which permitted her to give her son 24 hour support. Most parents don't have this and so must be perhaps more organized with their time in caring for their child. I know too many parents who have spend literally hours per day looking on the internet for the miracle diet or the silver-bullet of vitamins. This time probably could have been better spent with the child or taking care of oneself.