February postings

January postings

2001 postings

Eyes Wide Shut

Dancer in the Dark

Umbrellas

Air travel

The Radically Contingent Destination

Patria

Who is Felix Salmon?

Herbie Hancock

It's probably fair to say that there's been virtually nothing really new and different in popular music over the past few years. It's been nearly ten years since a band has come along which has changed the world's musical vocabulary in the way that Kraftwerk, the Sex Pistols, Public Enemy, Nirvana or Massive Attack did. That's fine: we don't need endless innovation all the time, and there's been no end of excellent artists putting a new spin on old styles: Oasis, Moby, Macy Gray.

Last night, however, I heard something genuinely new. It wasn't a musical revolution: Bill Laswell, Herbie Hancock's producer, has been making similar recordings for many years. Rather, what has happened, quietly, while no-one was really watching, is that performance technology has finally caught up with where studio technology was a few years ago.

I've never heard anything like it, and that's true on many different levels: I've never seen a grand piano on stage at Irving Plaza before, I've never been blown away by an Irving Plaza sound system before, and, most importantly, I've never before felt that performers have been able to combine the precision and technological sophistication of a studio recording with the elements of a live gig which can never be captured on DAT.

About five years ago, I went to see Spiritualized at the same venue, after becoming rather addicted to their masterful CD Ladies and Gentlemen we are Floating in Space. But the gig was dreadful, little more than a self-indulgent cacophonous two-hour feedback loop.

Fast forward to last night, and Herbie Hancock has two huge advantages over Spritualized: vastly superior technology, including surround sound in a live context for what he said was the first time ever, and a mind-blowingly good band. If Herbie Hancock got his big jazz break from Miles Davis, then he's doing the same favour to his own trumpeter, Wallace Roney, who provided the soulful heart of the evening.

Hancock himself, looking 20 years younger than his 62 years, proved himself to be just as adept on the piano as we all know he can be when he wants, and showed as well that there's still a huge gap between what can be done on an electronic keyboard and what can be done on a concert grand, even when the latter is amplified and distorted.

Elsewhere in the band, a pretty standard jazz line-up (keyboards, bass, drums, trumpet, all outstanding) was augmented with Laswell's favourite turntablist, DJ Disk, and Hancock himself on Korg, piano and a little twiddly instrument he kept in his shirt pocket.

They could certainly jam with the best, as they proved in the encore, when Hancock brought on Me'Shell Ndegocello on bass guitar. More importantly, though, they followed very complex Bill Laswell/Herbie Hancock lines for more than two hours without ever lapsing into the kind of now-it's-your-turn-now-it's-mine which you normally get with jazz ensembles. Even when legendary jazz drummer Jack DeJohnette took over the percussion for one tune, he melded seamlessly into the rest of the ensemble and didn't show off at all.

But beyond the sheer excellence of Herbie Hancock and his band, what really excites me is the prospect that, finally, live gigs are going to be able to include the best aspects of studio recordings. For far too long, concerts have often proved disappointing, with the artists bereft in the absence of their producer's sheen. What I learned last night was that if the artist is good enough, a live performance, no matter how electronic, can far surpass the best recording.

 

Felix at the Oscars

I called 'em. Unlike certain Belgians who never really outgrew their D&D phase, I knew that even the Academy at its worst wouldn't give the Best Picture award to a piece of dreck like Lord of the Rings. I got all four of the big awards, and five of the top six: I missed only Jim Broadbent for Iris, reckoning that Ian McKellen would win that one. So LOTR did even worse than I thought it would!

What I didn't expect was the angry reaction to the African-American sweep among certain of my fellow Oscar-watchers. The debate was so heated that it wasn't entirely clear what position people were taking, but there did seem to be a feeling that the Sidney/Halle/Denzel gongs smelled of political correctness if not tokenism.

Not true. The Academy was, of course, painfully aware of the dearth of black actors with leading-role statuettes, but it's been painfully aware of that for a long time. When Denzel was nominated for Malcom X in 1993, it had already been 29 years since Sidney Poitier's award for Lilies of the Field. This year, he was the beneficiary of the same forces that saw him lose out to an execrable performance by Al Pacino back then: the Acadmey's desire to reward one of its favourite actors, almost regardless of the nominated performance.

The difference this year is that Washington actually did just as well in Training Day as any of the other nominees did in their films. (Pacino beat out superior performances not only from Washington, but also from Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven and Robert Downey Jr in Chaplin.) In truth, Washington was unbeatable this year: the Academy loves to award the actors it loves, and it had a great performance to hang its award on. Russell Crowe lost for the flip reason: the Academy will never give an actor the top award two years in a row unless he's loved as much as Jimmy Stewart or Tom Hanks.

As for Halle Berry, she and Lions Gate worked the Oscar campaign masterfully, and her competition was two Grand Old Dames who already have Oscars, and two performances in what the Golden Globes calls a "comedy or musical". Given the choice between that and a serious, meaty, dramatic role, the Academy will always choose the drama.

Berry was by no means the highlight of the show, though: that was undoubtedly Woody Allen, appearing at his first awards ever (he didn't even show up the year he won for Annie Hall), and showing the likes of Billy Crystal and Whoopi Goldberg how a comic monologue is really done. Woody, you done all us New Yorkers proud.

Journalists and statistics

In recent days there has been much play over the fact that CNN, the Associated Press, NBC and other news organisations swallowed a statistically worthless report which said that underage drinkers drank 25% of all the alcohol consumed in the US. It turns out that the true figure is closer to 11%, and that the 25% figure, distributed by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University, was the result of not adjusting for an oversampling of teenagers in the National Household Drug Survey. (The Center's retraction of its original report makes it seem just like a surly teenager being forced to apologise for something he doesn't think he ought to apologise for: "In its report CASA estimates that underage drinkers consume 25 percent of the alcohol sold in the United States... If the over sample is adjusted to reflect the population, the percentage is 11.4 percent... Nevertheless, CASA's estimate is that underage drinkers consume 25 percent of the alcohol consumed in the U.S.")

I don't blame the news outlets for buying the 25% figure. It came from a highly reputable university, and it's within the bounds of possibility: teenagers account for 20% of the population, and there's no doubt that 18-20 year-olds do a lot of drinking. If the story is well sourced, busy journalists can't be blamed for not checking the statistical basis for every finding. Michael Kinsley says that the whole story demonstrates America's "national innumeracy"; I think it doesn't, but that other stories do.

The real problem is not the innumeracy of the nation in general, but rather of journalists specifically. Journalists are generally the sort of people who never really liked mathematics, stopped studying it as soon as their schools allowed them to, and like to rely on experts whenever numbers find their way into their stories. It's the old division between the arts and the sciences: journalists are writers, they shouldn't be expected to understand numbers.

Fact is, the experts upon whom journalists typically rely often don't have a strong grasp on their own numbers. I used to write up the weekly league tables for Bridge News: the obsessed-over rankings of which banks had underwritten the most bond deals. Pretty much every week, after receiving the fax from the people who drew up the numbers, I would find some problem with them, phone them up, and eventually get a corrected version a couple of hours later. No one else, as far as I knew, approached the league tables with any sort of critical eye: they just ran whatever numbers they were given.

But never mind statistical snafus: some stories in highly-respected publications quite happily print numbers which can't possibly be true. Reporting that 25% of alcohol is consumed by teenagers is a mistake; reporting that 98% of alcohol is consumed by teenagers would be an obvious sign of complete innumeracy.

Let's look at David Broder, dean of the Washington press corps, writing last week:

This factoid was picked up by The Week, where I read it as part of its round-up of the best columns in the US. The news summary magazine did appreciate how startling the figure was: "In 2000," it says, "political candidates paid TV stations an astonishing $800 billion to reach voters."

Astonishing? Unbelievable, more like. $800 billion works out at $3,200 per US citizen, or getting on for $10,000 per voter. It's roughly 16 times the market capitalisation of the Walt Disney Company, and is certainly a large multiple of the value of all the TV networks in America combined.

Going back to the source, you won't be surprised to hear, we find that the real number is not "almost $800 billion" but rather $771 million. The Washington Post was out by more than three orders of magnitude.

Two mistakes were made here. Someone, somewhere, misread a "million" as a "billion": this is understandable. But then no one stopped to think about whether the new number made sense: not David Broder, not the Washington Post copy editors, not the editors at The Week. These are people who are incredibly anal when it comes to errors of language, but they all seem to have a huge blind spot whenever a number enters a paragraph.

I think this is one of the reasons behind the press's failure to pull back the curtain on Enron. Journalists don't like numbers: they're nearly always happy to repeat whatever they're told, no matter how implausible it is. And as Broder shows us, they haven't learned their lesson.

 

 

February postings (Gerhard Richter; Michael Finkel and the New York Times Magazine; Kinsley on mammograms; Lord of the Rings; Books and Chomsky; Air travel redux; Mail.com redux; Self-esteem; Smith)
January postings (Information Superhighway Robbery; The fall and fall of celebrity journalism; Don't go anywhere near iname or mail.com; More on Sullivan and Krugman; Austerlitz; Talk, with hindsight; Talk, R.I.P.; Andrew Sullivan, Paul Krugman and Enron; Factoid of the day; Donnie Darko; Felix at the movies)
2001 postings