61–70 of 70 posts
I'm recovering from a year-long obsessive binge of Bill Evans Trio. For other fans here, I'm curious as to what your favorite album is? I Will Say Goodbye and Since We Met are brlliant, of course, but Sunday at the Village Vanguard with Scott Lafaro holds a special place in my heart. Yours?
What he said at the beginning is true for so many things... * management. My current manager refuses to understand actual technical challenges that we're dealing with. Instead he is just trying to figure out how the team can organize itself, and work with other teams, and scale itself, and collaborate, and track work, etc. I think we are making a lot of wrong decisions at the moment due to this stubbornness to unders…
Managers are needed to communicate between these experts, and it should go without saying that it's impossible for them to have the same expertise as each of the 2-1000s of experts under them.
> I think we are making a lot of wrong decisions at the moment due to this stubbornness to understand the actual types of problems we're trying to solve
Almost certainly you don't understand the types of problems your manager needs to solve also.
I'm recovering from a year-long obsessive binge of Bill Evans Trio. For other fans here, I'm curious as to what your favorite album is? I Will Say Goodbye and Since We Met are brlliant, of course, but Sunday at the Village Vanguard with Scott Lafaro holds a special place in my heart. Yours?
What he said at the beginning is true for so many things... * management. My current manager refuses to understand actual technical challenges that we're dealing with. Instead he is just trying to figure out how the team can organize itself, and work with other teams, and scale itself, and collaborate, and track work, etc. I think we are making a lot of wrong decisions at the moment due to this stubbornness to unders…
What Bill's talking about applies to artists/craftspeople/experts in a niche. Organisations are vastly more complicated than composition of music, in that many thousands of experts are needed to work together, each with their own unique expertise, versus just 1 for composition. Managers are needed to communicate between these experts, and it should go without saying that it's impossible for them to have the same expe…
A garden, being big or small, is still chaos: not that there's no order, but that there's different species (animal, vegetal, mineral) that coexist and upon which coexistence you can plan some sort of order.
But that plan and that order is purely the product of both what you, as a gardener/manager have in mind, and what the species can and let you do with them.
If you don't have a good understanding of what you can or cannot do with what you have (the framework), and what level of engagement is required from you (let it flow or actively intervene/change/break rules). And if you don't know people that are experts/practitioners as you are, that may help you - you may by chance have something nice/according to plan. Or not at all.
Well, music/craft/painting can also be (and is often) the result of a complex organization/network, when you take all the elements in place to obtain something: you, your skills, your desire, your tools (and those that build them and can help you), your fellow artists.
What Bill's talking about sound like a particular perspective on the Donning-Kruger effect, that applies to both small scale (managing single-person projects) and large scale (managing at large in an org).
"The professional...must fight to preserve the naiveté that the layman already possesses" - a genius quote by Bill Evans that applies to more than just music.
It also reminds me of the spontaneity Bob Dylan consciously strives to bring to his songwriting. He tries to avoid writing out of his conscious knowledge of how to write a song, and let his unconscious do it instead: "It’s nice to be able to put yourself in an environment where you can completely accept all the unconscious stuff that comes to you from your inner workings of your mind. And block yourself off to where you can control it all, take it down" https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/05/21/bob-dylan-songwrite...
The full documentary is worth checking out: The Universal Mind of Bill Evans (1966) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwXAqIaUahI Are there modern equivalents of this type of content? Longform discussions with a genius about their field, it is so good.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFt0cP-klQI
If you consider comedy a refined art as I do, Marc Maron gets into the pith with musicians, actors , writers and comedians as a rule. Another reply here makes the same point - podcasts seem to be the venue for this these days. I’d say creating space for the longer discussion is key.
Docs like this are diamonds in the rough though. Great post.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Those lush opening chords are what got me into Bill Evans. I also discovered Jaco Pastorius in a similar way. His bass playing in Bright Size Life was so distractingly good I had to investigate.
"The piano-and-bass introduction for the piece was written by Gil Evans for Bill Evans and Paul Chambers on Kind of Blue ."[0] At about 35 seconds into this[1] filmed version of So What , recorded between the 2 sessions for Kind of Blue , you can hear Gil conducting his intro, arranged for his orchestra. It sounds like pretty much exactly what Bill and PC play on the record. I'll give him credit for the sound of Flam…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sunday at the Village Vanguard and Waltz for Debby are 2 of the best live albums of any genre
Add to this Portrait in Jazz and Explorations. I’ve been listening to those four albums very regularly for 6-7 years now. For a while I listened to at least one of the four each night.
I'm recovering from a year-long obsessive binge of Bill Evans Trio. For other fans here, I'm curious as to what your favorite album is? I Will Say Goodbye and Since We Met are brlliant, of course, but Sunday at the Village Vanguard with Scott Lafaro holds a special place in my heart. Yours?
It's recorded weeks before his death. There's something special in his later performances.