#texture pack that tom uses: john smith

[syn4k]

I do not have the time nor mental capacity to get into Mianite rn, but from the screenshots you've posted I really like whatever texture pack they were using lol

well at least that's one person. everyone else ive talked to hates it o7

[jazzviewswithcjshearn]

In depth gig review: ECM at 50: Jazz at Lincoln Center, Rose Theater, November 1, 2019

In 1969, the landscape of music was changing greatly-- Woodstock was a cultural force, the Beatles released Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the first Santana album ushered in  a sort of Latin, jazz-rock hybrid, and Americans were reacting strongly to the senselessness of the Vietnam war.  The culture was changing, Eastern religions became a fascination as were mind altering drugs  which helped Westerners gain new perspectives into the universe.  Jazz and improvised music as a whole were changing with the seismic shifts of Miles Davis' Bitches Brew and Emergency by the Tony Williams Lifetime, which preceded the groundbreaking Davis recording by several months.  Jazz-rock, soulful Hammond organ based jazz, and free jazz had all carved their unique paths.  That same year, a new label out of Germany founded by a trained classical bassist named Manfred Eicher, who also had worked at Deutsche Grammophon made waves on the scene.  Edition of Contemporary Music, it's initials commonly mistaken for Eicher Creative Music, or European Classical Music, has arguably changed the face of boundary pushing music more than any other label over the past fifty years. ECM is known for a crystalline recording clarity, frequently found in classical music, a chamber music like focus, and a cinematic bent to albums, akin to film, one of Eicher's passions.

Contrary to popular belief, as journalist and ECM scholar John Kelman has noted, there is not really an “ECM sound”.   Critics of the label have frequently cited the heavy reverberant quality of many recordings as being distant and icy-- rather it would be more appropriate to say that while there are traits and a certain aesthetic that contributes to the label's recordings, there are plenty such as Jan Garbarek's Afric Pepperbird that have a very present immediacy with a fairly dry sound.  ECM helped establish through the recordings of Paul Bley, Chick Corea and especially Keith Jarrett, a new way of looking at solo piano, that has permanently changed the jazz landscape.  ECM brought attention to an entire generation of post Wes Montgomery guitar innovators: Ralph Towner, John Abercrombie, Terje Rypdal, a then relatively unknown prodigy from Lee's Summit Missouri with wild, shoulder length hair and a winning smile named Pat Metheny, sound sculpturist David Torn and Bill Frisell. The label also helped expand on an approach to ride cymbal playing that blended the intricacy of bebop, with a straight eighth note feel that allowed the rhythm to somehow swing and float simultaneously popularized by Norwegian Jon Christensen and Jack DeJohnette.  The label has also explored many cultures from Brazil, North Africa, and most recently Israel.  And last but not least, the label set a new precedent with album art the same way Blue Note, Impulse and CTI had.  Striking text only  or covers with evocative landscape photos with uniform fonts are art pieces in themselves. The sometimes startling 5 seconds of silence that begins each CD, demands that the listener pay close attention to the music within.

On November 1st at Jazz At Lincoln Center's Rose Theater, in the first of two days in New York City, ECM celebrated it's past, present and future.  The two and a half hour concert packed  a dizzying array of ECM and ECM associate artists that provided a concise snapshot of everything that has made the label enduring.  The evening's roster was studded with an impossible array of all stars and label newcomers: Egberto Gismonti, Ravi Coltrane, Larry Grenadier, Avishai Cohen, Enrico Rava, Bill Frisell, Joe Lovano, Shai Maestro, Nik Bartsch, Andrew Cyrille, Anja Lechner, Wadada Leo Smith, Meredith Monk, Vijay Iyer and  Jack DeJohnette among others.  Unlike some retrospective concerts which are quick summations of hits the musicians, allowed between one and three selections in specific configurations, used the pieces as launching pads for exploration, keeping with the label ethos.  There were some notable absences, Pat Metheny, Terje Rypdal, Manfred Eicher himself who could not make the trip, the recently retired Jarrett, Jan Garbarek, and Gary Peacock to name but a few who had such a major impact, but those who were there, more than made up for it.  

Egberto Gismonti, non pareil Brazilian pianist and guitarist who has been a major figure in Brazilian music and guitar, opened the concert on piano and seemingly fit an entire history of Brazilian music styles in relative brevity. Recent label signee, saxophone veteran Joe Lovano, pianist Marilyn Crispell, and drummer Carmen Castaldi who appeared on Trio Fascination earlier this year, gave a spirited rendition of “The Smiling Dog” that found Lovano's breathy, woody, impassioned tenor phrases framed by Crispell's tone clusters and jabs, Castaldi's spattering cymbals, rim clatters, and painterly snare and tom strokes building to a slow burn.  The elongated interpretation added considerably more heat than the version that appeared on the recording.  Vijay Iyer and Wadada Leo Smith built upon their fascinating and excellent duo album A Cosmic Rhythm Within Each Stroke by engaging in an enthralling duet blurring the line between new music and improvisation.  Iyer probed with  a variety of textures from acoustic piano and Fender Rhodes, grounded eighth note pulses freeing the legendary trumpeter, hunkered over in a near squat, bell in microphone to roam with signature legato lines, and carefully considered asides.  Smith straightened from his bent position, and stood stock still with his horn, making the silence count as much as the notes, as Iyer continued to mine abstract shapes and textures, returning from Rhodes to piano.  Smith reached for a golden Harmon mute on the floor, and utilized some amusing wah wah trumpet effects that traveled back to the earliest history of jazz trumpet through a thoroughly post modern prism.  

Bill Frisell and Thomas Morgan reprised Paul Motian's “It Happened A Long Time Ago”, Frisell's trademark neck bending of notes veered them off into space as his solo contained much thoughtful meditations.  Morgan's rich tone and backing brought to mind the sorely missed late Charlie Haden whose label contributions were immeasurable.  Wadada and legendary drummer Andrew Cyrille joined them on stage for two tracks from Cyrille's Declaration of Musical Independence, and besides Smith's sparkling trumpet, and an incredibly attuned Frisell, Cyrille showed exactly why he has been one of the most important figures in jazz with his unmistable ability to color and orchestrate on the drums as if the cymbals and drums were a large canvas.

Over the past few years, ECM has  had a huge Israeli contingent with important albums coming from Avishai Cohen, both in quartet and duo with pianist Yonathan Avishai.  Though the  duo just released the wonderful Playing The Room, the pair appeared as a quartet with bassist Barak Mori and drummer Ziv Ravitz, who replaced Nasheet Waits (playing later in the evening) for an aggressive, power packed “Shoot Me In The Leg”.  Cohen's composition  burst with the energy of New York jazz; it was the kind of performance that could only exist in the post Wynton Marsalis, Young Lions era.  Cohen played with whalloping energy and purpose, occasionally pointing the bell of his horn into the piano to add extra reverberation and resonant qualities.  Ravitz added further heat with well timed explosions.

As mentioned a bit earlier, ECM frequently draws the  line between new music and improvisation.  For those who may be curious reading this review unfamiliar with the term, new music refers to classical music composed by living, modern composers.  Though the pieces can be composed in styles such as romantic, baroque or classical styles, very often new music challenges listeners pushing at the boundaries of form, instrumentation or what music is.  Swiss pianist Nik Bartsch and his bands Ronin and Mobile specialize in a minimalist influenced form called ritual groove music.  Bartsch carries on a tradition of minimalism at ECM most famously espoused by Steve Reich and (to an extent) Meredith Monk,.  With Ronin or Mobile it is updated with grooves that attract newer listeners. There is a heavy African element to the intense, precise metronome like grooves, which change over time through the pianist's shouted verbal cues. Bartsch, coming to the stage dressed in all black, looking like a cross of a martial arts master with something out of The Matrix played a solo version for the first time of “Modul 5”. The concentrated performance  captured the essence of his main band, nothing was missing.  Craig Taborn also offered a spikier take on solo piano in the avant garde realm making for refreshing contrast.

Ravi Coltrane, Matthew Garrison and Jack DeJohnette took to the stage to close the concert's first half for a searing “Serpentine Fire”, the Earth, Wind and Fire classic the trio collective recorded on their 2016 In Movement. DeJohnette, who has been the most recorded drummer on ECM (first appearing with Keith Jarrett on Ruta And Daitya in 1971) has a synergy with Coltrane and Garrison that is magical.  They can  literally go anywhere with the level of trust and camaraderie, and they certain went everywhere on “Serpentine Fire”.  Garrison bolstered the lengthy rubato introduction with Hendrixian distorted bass, fuzzed out leads traipsing atop looped backgrounds set for himself.  DeJohnette, behind his slick camouflage finish Sonor kit, added a shower of well placed cymbal work, punctuating with loud crashes on his Sabian Encore model China, and crash cymbals.  His patented rumbling tom free falls adding a beautiful tension underneath Garrison and Coltrane's sopranino saxophone.  By the time the drummer entered into a groove, things moved from a slow burn to an ecstatic frenzy, DeJohnette engaging in his love of rock and funk with displaced brilliance, the tune brought Rose Theater to it's feet.

In the second half, Ethan Iverson and Mark Turner  explored more of their chamber duo camaraderie found on Temporary Kings with Iverson proudly displaying his ECM shirt to the audience at tune's end.  By far, as excellent as all the music was, the most touching of the music all evening was Meredith Monk's rendition of “Gotham Lullaby” first heard on her masterpiece Dolmen Music, her ECM debut from 1980. As a vocalist, performance artist, and new music composer, the soon to be 77 year old Monk is singular and has influenced a legion of vocalists who employ extended technique, including Bjork, and label mate Theo Bleckmann, a Meredith Monk Vocal Ensemble alumnus that appeared on two recordings.  The poignancy of “Gotham Lullaby” was made all the more poignant when she dedicated the piece to the healing of the earth and when one considers the context of the piece. Understanding the context of Monk's pieces can greatly aid in appreciation and sparking the listeners imagination for their own mental images.  The piece was originally written in 1979 for a stage adaptation of Fear and Loathing adapted by long time collaborator, Ping Chong titled Fear and Loathing in Gotham.  Chong, one of the most important and influential figures in interdisciplinary performance, and one of the leaders in providing a forum for Asian American artists, based the non narrative play on a white officer tracking down an Asian serial killer.   Though Monk has since revised some of the wordless syllables that appeared on the original recording, the warmth of her rich alto range had lost none of it's emotive power.  Knowing the theme of the original play, her wild, intense, frightened ululations were even more chilling. Besides Anja Lechner, she represented the ECM New Series side of the label, focusing on groundbreaking works of classical and new music.  

Ravi Coltrane returned to the stage donning tenor saxophone with Ralph Alessi on trumpet, Andy Milne on piano, Drew Gress on bass and Mark Ferber on drums for “Iram Issala” from Alessi's Imaginary Friends.  This is a great quintet, and the rapport Alessi and Coltrane have dates to the latter's lone Blue Note recording Spirit Fiction in 2012 where the trumpeter appeared on several numbers.  Their soaring perfect fourth based line at the end of the piece was magisterial as they became one.  The piece shifted through several moods during the solos, and by the time they reached the unison phrase it was purely cathartic.  To finish the evening, Joe Lovano returned with Enrico Rava who had flown in from Italy with pianist Giovanni Guidi, and the group was completed by Dezron Douglas, one of New York's bass A listers, and Nasheet Waits on drums.  The band looked at “Interiors” and Lovano's “Fort Worth” heard on their dynamic new album Roma.  Waits, who replaced Gerald Cleaver for the concert was a marvel on the hard swinging Ornette Coleman inspired Lovano composition.  Rava brought a very interesting texture on flugelhorn, much different than Tom Harrell, who recorded an earlier version of the tune on Quartets: Live At The Village Vanguard  in 1996.  Rava and Lovano were quite playful in collective dialogue, and Waits unbreakable strength ride beat spurred them on.  Giovanni Guidi as he does on Roma revealed himself as an improviser of remarkable depth, as the two pieces tapped into a blusier, hard swinging side of his musical personality.  His Avec Les Temps from earlier this year showed a richer compositional voice and orchestrative acumen with tenor saxophone and guitar added to the ensemble.

With it's 50th Anniversary gala, ECM provided something of a rarity in the modern concert era.  Very rarely do people get to see so many of the label's legends and stars in such a carefully organized event. ECM had presented festival nights as did CTI and Blue Note in the 70's, but a label concert package today is not often found. The November 1 concert was truly special.  ECM showed just how enduring of a cultural institution it is, and how focused it is on bringing public attention to great musicians today.  The label modus operandi, though it has released some fantastic archival releases and presented long out of print titles in high resolution digital for streaming, is mainly concentrated on the present.  Manfred Eicher,  as label founder, producer and visionary keeps moving forward providing an embarrassment of consistently excellent music. The ECM at 50 celebration was a way to honor the past, and present of a juggernaut in recorded music.

[orioleroofing]

For a Roof in Old Westbury, N.Y., a Singular Slate From England

Reprinted from the New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/20/realestate/old-westbury-gardens-slate-from-england.html

For a Roof in Old Westbury, N.Y., a Singular Slate From England

To make repairs, Westbury House on Long Island needed a supply of Collyweston slate, but all of the mines had closed decades earlier. Then one reopened.The Life of a Mansion in Old Westbury, N.Y.10 PhotosView Slide Show›via John S Phipps Archives, Old Westbury Gardens

By John Freeman Gill

Dec. 20, 2019

26

Nobody ever said that New York was a movable feast, but one rich family did its best to make it one a century ago by packing up an entire, sumptuous Fifth Avenue dining room and reassembling it in the country.

In 1927, shortly before the demolition of the steel magnate Henry Phipps’s marble Renaissance mansion at 87th Street, his eldest son, John S. Phipps, salvaged its dining room’s ceiling and paneling and brought them under the roof of his grand home in Old Westbury, a colony of millionaires on Long Island.

That dining room — now featuring a family portrait by John Singer Sargent — has been a major attraction ever since in the Georgian Revival manse on the Phipps estate, which has been open to the public as Old Westbury Gardens since 1959.

The formal dining room of the steel magnate Henry Phipps’s Fifth Avenue mansion was salvaged before the building’s demolition in 1927 and reassembled at Westbury House on Long Island.Credit…Stefano Ukmar for The New York Times

But the English slate roof that shelters the room and 22 others has been a beautiful headache ever since it was installed in 1905. By 2005, the slates were in such gross disrepair that a British consultant diagnosed them in terms worthy of a medical examiner.

ADVERTISEMENTContinue reading the main story

“He declared our roof ‘perished,’” said Lorraine Gilligan, the gardens’ director of preservation.

Restoring the roof with historically appropriate new material seemed impossible, however, until recently — when the world’s only mine producing its distinctive limestone slate reopened for the first time in half a century.

Subscribe to The Times

Westbury House boasts what experts believe is the only roof in the United States made of Collyweston slate, a singular material prized for centuries in England for its hardiness and for the distinctive golden yellow it turns with oxygen exposure. The slate was long employed on farmhouses and manor houses throughout Britain, as well as at Cambridge and Oxford universities.

How Westbury House came to be topped by a British stone so alien to America is a trans-Atlantic tale of successes and failures, of fabulously wealthy heirs and hardworking laborers. And the story has come full circle this year, as one of the Englishmen installing the replacement roof is the great-great-grandson of a slater who sailed from Britain in 1905 to consult on the original roof.

ADVERTISEMENTContinue reading the main story

Construction of Westbury House around 1905.Credit…via John S Phipps Archives, Old Westbury Gardens

Westbury House in 2004, with its distinctive roof of golden-yellow Collyweston slates.Credit…via John S Phipps Archives, Old Westbury Gardens

Both the lady of Westbury House and its designer were English. In 1903, John Phipps, known as Jay, married Margarita Grace, whose family owned the shipping line that became the Grace Steamship Company. Mr. Phipps promised to build his bride a great country house reminiscent of those in her native country.

To keep his word, he turned to the London aesthete George Crawley, a passionate student of design with no formal architectural training. According to a biography by Cuthbert Headlam, Mr. Crawley had befriended Amy Phipps, Jay’s sister, while the Phipps clan was renting a manor in England.

In 1904 the Phipps patriarch, a partner of Andrew Carnegie, hired Mr. Crawley to decorate several rooms of his Manhattan mansion, including the one that was eventually transferred to Westbury House. That same year, Jay Phipps retained Mr. Crawley to design Westbury House itself.

ADVERTISEMENTContinue reading the main story

“He was at last enabled to put into actual shape — in stone and marble, in iron and wood — the beautiful things which filled his mind,” Mr. Crawley’s biographer noted. To help him realize his vision, Mr. Crawley was paired with Grosvenor Atterbury, an architect of Gilded Age confections both on Long Island and in Manhattan.

At Old Westbury, Mr. Crawley conjured up a home of subdued, symmetrical elegance, its cherry red Virginia brick accented by cream-colored Indiana limestone and a terra-cotta cornice.

The house’s crowning glory was to be its broad-hipped roof of gold-hued Collyweston slate, a material Mr. Crawley likely knew from visits to a relative who lived near where it was mined.

The slate is made from a unique limestone found only in a narrow, three-foot seam 40 feet beneath the earth in Collyweston, a Northamptonshire village.

ADVERTISEMENTContinue reading the main story

The new Collyweston slate roof at Westbury House. The distinctive limestone material grows more golden over time as it is exposed to oxygen.Credit…Stefano Ukmar for The New York Times

“Ours is the only working Collyweston slate mine in the world,” said Nigel Smith, whose company, Claude N. Smith, began producing its first new slate in 2016. “But we know from rough drawings of the area that during the 1800s peak, there were at least a dozen.”

The laborious traditional production method required three to four winters to create slates. Once mined, hunks of stone called logs were laid in a field and kept constantly wet to promote repeated freeze-thaw cycles. Eventually, the stone began to split and workers separated it into sheets of slate with a hand-forged tool known in England as a cliving hammer.

Climate change badly damaged production in the 20th century, however, by reducing the number of frosts. Builders, meanwhile, began buying cheaper, reclaimed slates from farmhouses. By the early 1970s, all the Collyweston mines were shuttered.

ADVERTISEMENTContinue reading the main story

But as buyers like King’s College, Cambridge, emerged, Mr. Smith reopened the mine beneath the land his father had bought as a builder’s yard in the 1980s.

Technological breakthroughs made the new slating business viable. Limestone logs are now mined by a robot called the Brokk 100, and clever innovations have reduced production time from years to about a week.

Instead of relying on nature to provide the necessary frosts, Mr. Smith said, he experimented with a “lorry-back freezer,” a frozen-food truck he bought on the cheap from the Tesco supermarket chain. He now uses refrigerated steel containers designed for carrying frozen goods on ships.

Among the four workers Mr. Smith sent across the pond this year to install 37,000 new Collyweston slates at Westbury House was 26-year-old Tom Measures, a big, shy man whose baby face is covered with a rugged brown beard. It was Mr. Measures’ ancestor, Arthur Osborne, who sailed on the S.S. Teutonic from Liverpool with a fellow slater in 1905 to consult on the original roof.

ADVERTISEMENTContinue reading the main story

Mr. Osborne’s services were necessary because American workers had botched the roofing job, failing to allow for air circulation around the slates and using stiff Portland cement instead of a more breathable mortar mix. Many slates also broke during shipping and installation.

This time around, Old Westbury Gardens made sure to import Collyweston artisans.

“This is a true heritage trade,” said Kurt Hirschberg, the lead designer of the roof restoration for Jan Hird Pokorny Associates, the project’s architect. The slaters perform the job in pairs, he noted, “and there’s a rhythm to the two of them working back and forth that’s amazing to see.”

Two English slaters, Tom Measures, left, and Conor Depellette, installing a new Collyweston slate roof on Westbury House in early December. Credit…Stefano Ukmar for The New York Times

ADVERTISEMENTContinue reading the main story

On a recent frigid morning, as a bone-chilling wind sent snow flurries dancing, Mr. Measures and Conor Depellette balanced themselves on a plank supported by ladders near the ridge of the mansion’s 60-foot-high roof.

Working toward each other from opposite ends of a stretch of roof, the partners were mirror images as they moved along a horizontal wooden batten that had been nailed across the roof’s surface.

After setting a line of lime-rich mortar, each man would lay down a slate and push its bottom edge into the mortar bed until the excess oozed out like mustard from a sandwich. Then he would pick out the optimal next slate, expertly anticipating the width, thickness and texture needed to create the right functional and aesthetic relationship to both its neighboring slate and the two just below it.

When the pair met in the middle, each went along his half of the course of slates, driving a nail through a pre-drilled hole in the top of each slate and into a batten. The process, performed with a minimum of words, was intuitive and oddly intimate.

ADVERTISEMENTContinue reading the main story

Later, as the pair tooled back the mortar in the slate joints to create a clean drip edge, the scraping of their trowels echoed across the countryside.

“It’s a long, long way from home, and it’s pretty surreal,” Mr. Measures said, looking out from his rooftop perch. “It’s just crazy to think I’m working on a roof one of my ancestors was working on over a hundred years ago.” Pausing to scratch his beard, he added, “It makes me feel quite proud, really.”

from Oriole Roofing https://ift.tt/35OHH7P roofing contractors Baltimore MA flat roof repair Baltimore Baltimore roofing roofing contractors Baltimore MD