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In the late 1980s, sound archivists discovered that many of their tapes were crumbling into dust. A condition known as sticky shed syndrome was causing several tape stocks from the 1970s to grow unstable, due to a problem with the adhesive binding that affixed the magnetic oxide to its polyester backing. In the worst cases, an affected tape would literally shed off its oxide the moment it was played, irrevocably destroying the item. Although preservationists quickly devised effective solutions, the threat of loss surrounding sticky shed has continued to loom large in popular media, appearing each year in news stories about important artefacts at risk of disintegration. This article considers the overpowering language of anxiety that saturates these discussions, arguing that the anxiety does not stem from sticky shed alone, but is built into the very nature of sound recording and archival practice.

Linked Jazz. M. Cristina Pattuelli, Project Director. URL: https://linkedjazz.org A tremendous amount of jazz scholarship centers on the professional and social networks connecting musicians. This is, perhaps, appropriate for a music that focuses so intimately on real-time collaboration. Even as musicians strive to develop their own unique voices on their instruments, they do so by listening closely to their fellow artists, by sharing information, by emulating idols, by interacting with bandmates and audiences. Tracing these connections between artists has—for better and for worse—been a primary preoccupation of jazz history since its inception. How many of us have crossed paths with the type of “human encyclopedia” historians who seem to know the personnel of every recording session since the Original Dixieland Jazz Band? Who know every artist's high school and the name of their first teacher? Who know what records they bought and how worn down the grooves were? Indeed, how many of us spent early portions of our own careers striving to develop these very same skills (again, for better and for worse)? But what if there were a way to use digital tools to map these connections more efficiently? What if we could use online resources to trace more comprehensive networks and develop new ways to study them? Such are the questions posed by the architects of the Linked Jazz project, an initiative founded in 2011 by a group of digital information specialists based primarily at New York's Pratt Institute. …

As an axiomatic condition of sound, loudness is implicated at all levels of aural perception. Ever in contest, loudness asserts its importance in noise ordinances and stage whispers, on the battlefield and by the infant’s bedside. Yet despite its pervasiveness, loudness remains among the least-analyzed components of the sonic encounter. Focusing on musical applications and listener accounts, this article considers the role of loudness as a generator of sonic affect, situating it within a matrix of psychoacoustic and phenomenological processes. The essay distills three (non-exhaustive) types of commonly reported loudness-effects, which are dubbed ‘listener collapse’, ‘imagined loudness’, and ‘noise occupation’. A final section applies these effects to two recent theories of musical aesthetics: Michel Poizat’s operatic ‘cry’ and Fred Moten’s discussion of ‘Aunt Hester’s scream’. Though multiple levels of loudness experience are considered, the analysis pays particular attention to the force of high-...

This chapter looks at the multifaceted ways that loft artists envisioned freedom as an inspiration for their work. Rather than hewing to a single definition, however, artists employed the term to connote a wide variety of different meanings. The chapter examines several in succession, including definitions that foreground: collectivist or communalist practices, rooted in civil rights and 1960s counterculture movements; self-creation and identity politics; off-the-grid living strategies; transgression and transcendence, and “energy music” aesthetics that feature minimal pre-composed elements. Ultimately, the term “freedom” emerges as powerfully overdetermined, as it is used to reference a number of interrelated goals and values.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of New York's so-called “loft jazz era,” one of the least-understood periods in jazz history. Spanning from the mid-1960s until about 1980, the jazz lofts were a dense network of musician-run performance venues established in and around the former industrial buildings of lower Manhattan. The majority of these spaces were also musicians' homes, a factor that allowed them to operate with minimal overhead costs. In various contexts, lofts acted as rehearsal halls, classrooms, art galleries, living quarters, and meeting spaces. Their most visible role, however, was as public performance venues, especially for younger members of the jazz avant garde. At a time when few commercial nightclubs were interested in experimental styles, the lofts became a bustling base of operations for a growing community of young improvisers.

This chapter outlines the loft scene itself, starting with an in-depth look at the 1972 New York Musicians' Jazz Festival—an event cited by many musicians as a germinal moment for the scene. The movement is traced through its peak around mid-decade, and into its subsequent decline amidst a string of new financial and structural challenges. These final years also saw a growing number of critiques leveled by musicians who disputed the efficacy of the lofts. Whereas the movement had begun as a campaign against industry exploitation, its failure to develop viable alternatives ultimately made it vulnerable to the criticism that lofts merely repackaged the inadequate conditions of nightclub performance.

This chapter discusses the physical spaces of the lofts, exploring how the surrounding environment afforded certain types of performer and listener experience. In contrast to architectural accounts of loft conversions for high-end housing—which often romanticize the industrial history of old factories—musicians' accounts tended to be largely devoid of nostalgia for a bygone era. Instead, descriptions of loft jazz venues generally focused on the creative possibilities enabled by the presence of large, raw spaces. By emphasizing the liberatory potential of blank space, rather than the nostalgic echoes of industrial place, organizers stressed underlying values of reclamation and community-building. The chapter goes on to consider descriptions that referenced markers of domesticity in loft venues, a factor that carried additional resonances in regard to gender politics.

This chapter discusses the early motivations for the lofts, arguing that the movement emerged at a unique intersection between national discourses on musician empowerment and local urban ecologies specific to late 1960s New York. In 1960s New York, several initiatives began striving toward broader collectivist ideals. These initiatives include the short-lived Jazz Artists' Guild (JAG), the Jazz Composers' Guild (JCG), and the Triumvirate formed by John Coltrane, Babatunde Olatunji, and Yusef Lateef. These examples of 1960s New York collectivism were all rooted in guild and/or trade union strategies. In all three cases, artists envisioned temporarily removing themselves from the commercial market in order to enhance their negotiating leverage as members of a larger movement. Unfortunately, despite their success in generating attention for particular events, none of these groups managed to build an alliance large enough or long-lived enough to realized their principal goals.

This concluding chapter assesses the ongoing resonance of the loft era by examining multiple musical legacies that emerged in the aftermath of the loft era. So much of the New York jazz avant garde continues to revolve around musician-organized practices, which often share many of the concerns noted throughout this book. These include: an ongoing concern with ideals of freedom, both as a musical value and a political program for self-determination; a community-oriented focus, aimed at bringing together artists and listeners; efforts to build and/or repurpose spaces for cultivating artistic practices; and relying on a combination of cooperative DIY practices and funding through grants and city arts programs. Through the efforts of artist-organizers, New York has continually managed to maintain an active and intergenerational community of improvisers, many of whom hold direct ties to the loft era.

By Gabriel Solis. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. ISBN: 978‐0‐520‐25201‐1 (paperback). Pp. 239. $23.95. The “great man” approach to jazz history is dead. It was eulogized and buried...

This article traces the history of the New York Musicians Organization (NYMO), an artist-run collective that rose to brief prominence at the dawn of the loft jazz era. Founded in 1972, NYMO attracted a broad membership and considerable press attention for two heavily-publicized summer festivals. In stressing themes of self-reliance, avant garde performance practice and African American agency, the group’s organizers drew extensively from earlier Midwestern collectives like the AACM. Yet unlike those groups, NYMO failed to establish a strong central governing body, instead acting as a consortium of smaller, independently-managed ventures. This approach laid the groundwork for the proliferation of small-scale initiatives that characterized the loft period, and several former NYMO members went on to establish important loft venues. While the group’s prominence was short-lived, it played a crucial bridge role between the collectivized strategies of the 1960s and the loosely-connected musical networks of the loft era.

Objectives:To evaluate the effectiveness of interactive videodisc (IVD) instruction of paramedics through the use of computer analysis of trip sheets.Design/Setting:Prospective, controlled, in an urban 9-1-1, paramedic, emergency medical services (EMS) system with total call volume of 62,000/year; 15,000 advanced life support (ALS).Interventions:All 150 paramedics in the system received eight hours of IVD instruction covering five subject areas: 1) airway; 2) head/cervical trauma; 3) chest; 4) shock; and 5) cardiac arrest. Trip sheets from 9,943 runs in the pre-IVD period were subjected to computer analysis, and a compliance score was generated using previously developed algorithms that assigned a weight to each omission and commission. After a nine-month IVD training period, 4,303 cases were collected and analyzed in the post-IVD period. Statistical analyses were made using “Student's“ t-test and Chi-square with alpha set at 0.05.Exclusions:Only those records of adult patients who fit one of the five protocols were eligible for computer analysis. Of the 9,943 cases in the pre-IVD group, 480 (4.8%) were excluded, all due to inadequate data recording by the paramedics. A statistically similar portion, 233 (5.4%) of the 4,303 post-IVD instruction cases were excluded (p = .15).Results:Overall the mean compliance score of the pre-IVD group was 0.65 ±0.19 (±SD). The post-IVD group score was 0.65 ±0.19 (p = 0.99). Analysis of scores for each algorithm also showed no significant differences. This study had an observed power of .94 to detect a difference in compliance as small as 0.030.Conclusion:Eight hours of IVD instruction did not result in improved paramedic performance as judged by computer analysis of trip sheets.

Objectives:A growing number of golfers are senior citizens, and it may be predicted that the number of golf-related medical emergencies, including the incidence of cardiac arrest, will increase. This study was designed to survey the level of preparedness of golf courses in Southeastern Pennsylvania to respond to cardiac arrest among their members.Methods:A telephone survey of all of the 180 golf courses in the area was conducted to determine their type (public/private), volume in rounds per year, presence of automated external defibrillator (AED) devices, number of employees, and percentage of employees with cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) training. Participants also were asked to estimate the time needed to reach the farthest point on their course in order to estimate a maximum time to the application of an AED device.Results:A total of 131 of 180 golf courses completed the survey (53 private, 78 public) for an overall response rate of 73%. Private courses reported a greater average number of employees with CPR training [private = 9.1, public = 3.6; p = 0.001] and in AED presence [public = 9%, private = 58.5%; p = 0.0001]. Public courses support a higher volume of play than do private courses [public = 32,000, private = 24,000; p = 0.001], yet have far fewer employees [public = 25, private = 44; p = 0.004]. The longest time necessary to reach the most remote point on the course was between four and five minutes in all courses. Analysis was performed using the Student's t-test and Pearson's Chi-square as appropriate.Conclusion:Neither public nor private golf courses are well equipped to respond to cardiac arrest, but outcomes on public courses likely are to be far worse.

The helicopter transport of acute cardiac patients has become increasingly common, although no study has examined solely the effect of such transport on outcome in this subset of patients. A combined air and ground critical care transport service provided the opportunity for a direct comparison of patients with acute cardiac conditions (myocardial infarction or unstable angina) transported either by our helicopter or by a specially equipped critical care ground vehicle. Both air and ground components were similarly equipped in terms of personnel and medical equipment. Seventy-eight (27 ground, 51 air) transport cases were studied. Both patient groups were comparable in terms of age, sex, Killip classification, and diagnosis. Serious untoward events, defined as arrhythmias, chest pain, hypotension, bradycardia, seizures, and cardiac arrest, occurred in 41% of air transports and 7.5% of ground transports (P less than .002). The overall incidence of untoward events was also significantly greater with air transports (25/51, or 49%) than with the ground vehicle (4/27, or 15%; P less than .005). The reasons for these differences are unknown.