Weird question--does anyone have the christmas mixes I made a couple years ago handy? I have cds of them all, but they are (of course) in the US, but I was hoping someone might have downloaded some of them and still had them for me to, ah, re-download.

I have some of them, SA, but not at work, and probably not every single song. Also, I'm leaving town this afternoon, so I wouldn't be able to upload stuff until next week.

No biggie. I just wanted to burn them off for christmas music at Lush, so whenever you have them handy. Thanks!

What if you were paralyzed, sorta' like Stephen Hawking, and the only way you had to communicate was by operating a hand-held electronic thingie, except the hand-held electronic thingie was an iPod. So you could only communicate by selecting various songs to play.

I suppose the TMBG song "I'm Having a Heart Attack" could come in handy at some point in your life. And P-C could have played The White Stripes song "I Think I Smell a Rat" when he had his rodent crisis recently....

So you could only communicate by selecting various songs to play.

That was a plot point in the Transformers movie. Really.

That was a plot point in the Transformers movie. Really.

Huh. I should totally become a Hollywood screenwriter. Or, you know, write stuff for the SciFi Channel....

Hi all. Not to barge in on a thread I don't usually read, but I figure you all would know if anyone would. I am listening to "Blue Monk," a John Coltrane/Thelonius Monk collaboration at Carnegie Hall (don't know the date), and I can hear someone humming tunelessly in the middle of one of the solos, and hissing through his teeth elsewhere. Would that be Coltrane, or Monk, or someone else?

It doesn't bother me; I also have Glenn Gould's Bach recordings, where he accompanies himself with noodly whispers of singing, and I think it's neat. I just, would like to locate this instance of noodling in proper context.

Monk hummed along with his solos. There's a neat story behind that album, which was recorded in 1957, if you want to hear it.

Do tell!

I started to write it down, but here's a better telling from All Things Considered.

All Things Considered, October 5, 2005 - One day in late January, Larry Appelbaum was thumbing through some old Voice of America audiotapes about to be digitized at the Library of Congress when he made a discovery that would stun him and many other jazz fans.

Eight 10-inch reels of acetate tape were labeled "Carnegie Hall Jazz 1957." One of the tape boxes had a handwritten note on the back that said "T. Monk" with some song titles.

Appelbaum, a jazz specialist at the Library of Congress, got excited at the prospect of finding unpublished materials by the jazz master Thelonious Monk. Then he heard another distinctive sound. "I recognized the tenor saxophone of John Coltrane and my heart started to race," Appelbaum says.

The Nov. 29, 1957, concert was recorded by the Voice of America but never broadcast. For years, the recordings were lost and forgotten. Now, thanks to Appelbaum's discovery, Blue Note Records is releasing them.