Just came from my kid's school district jazz fest. One of the band instructors mentioned Sonny Rollins had passed and he was the last jazz legend alive that appeared in the A Great Day in Harlem photo : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Great_Day_in_Harlem Maybe what they were referring to...
Sonny Rollins was probably the last great player from the bebop age though who was there at its birth, and probably the last master who played with Charlie Parker too!
Ron Carter and Herbie Hancock are still going strong of course, and still brilliant. George Coleman, Jack DeJohnette, and Dave Holland are all still playing to pick some other names at random.
I have to admit, I was a little surprised to discover that Rollins was still alive. You tend to assume that giants like him are all in the distant past, not still walking the earth.
They’re playing together at the Monterey Jazz Festival in September. Bit of a stretch to go to that, but I might go to Indianapolis to see Herbie in August.
As someone who has both TE and monome gear along with Elektron, Moog, and a decent variety of other gear, I still don’t understand the hate toward TE and it reminds me very much of the Apple haters who bash the company no matter what they ship claiming it’s all over-priced and that you can get better gear for less.
Back in the early 2000’s people made the same sort of comments about Apple laptops that I see applied to TE where they claimed
Apple made laptops for hipsters rather than serious machines.
I find monome a really curious example to use in particular because if anything norns is incredibly overpriced for what it does (something people call out regularly in forums).
TE makes a particular form factor that is small, light, easy to travel with, and easy to pull out and use with a small amount of space for a music setup. I pull out my TX-6 far more often than my Audiofuse Studio these days for that reason. Despite it being more expensive with fewer features the convenience for someone that doesn’t have a large dedicated space for music more than makes up for the price premium.
I have used all of this gear for years, and I have worked in product development in the pro audio industry for decades (you might even recognize some of the things I've worked on) and the thing I don't like about TE is the pretentiousness of their products, which are dressed up and fancy but fundamentally limited when compared to the competition. They don't provide good end value, all things considered - and especially not in a very competitive industry that is always innovating and finding ways to bring the BOM budget into reasonable levels.
monome is an example of a high-end/hipster product you can build yourself for peanuts, so don't overlook that factor. Plus, the ecosystem that its community has built, due to the open nature of its architecture, is superlative - similar to that of Zynthian, which has attained a huge faithful following for the same reason, and both Zynthian and monome are 100x more innovative than TE, for 1/8th the cost, generally.
I have a small form-factor recording device in my pocket already, which I simply plug a microphone into and start recording, right away, at seriously higher quality than I need for most purposes. It only cost me a couple hundred bucks, plus a couple hundred for a decent microphone, and it works far, far better than the flimsy bespoke parts of the TX-6 can withstand. Plus, it can do Internet and movies and music with a great deal of ease.
TE make good props for hipsters. They don't make great musical instruments.
If you compare the trajectories, I think it’s safe to say software has been a dumpster fire under Craig compared to what’s been accomplished on the hardware side. The fact that Craig has been the face of WWDC for many years made many people see him as the face of the company but it’s been clear they have been elevating Ternus’s visibility in product announcements for a few years now.
Apple Silicon wasn’t under his purview, that would be Johny Srouji.
Not saying that Ternus wouldn’t have been involved in or part of the decision making process in moving the Mac to Apple-designed silicon, but I haven’t seen any indication he was any more involved than other execs at the company.
I wrote RPG II code in the 80s and helped the company I was working part-time for transition to another one of these S/36 emulation environments on the PC in the 90s. The software we used was made by the very generically named California Software Products.
It worked well enough and allowed the company to run until the founder retired and folded the business.
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