sgcim

RIP, I liked the timbre of SL's voice a lot.

Only 63? What a terrible thing. He was an Indiana cat who was friends with Jim Herrington of SD, which was how he got with Fagen. RIP.

I guess I fall into the "better with horns" camp. Last Sunday as we drove in to Brooklyn for what's left of the family's annual dinner out together, we listened to Sid Gribbets' Sunday special on Stitt on KCR. I kept thinking, "Who the heck is that pianist playing with him? He shaw nuff be sounding good. I was amazed to find out that OP was the pianist on almost all of the quartet cuts Sid played. I said to myself, "Well I'll be darned!" We had a very nice, peaceful dinner together, until I made the mistake of asking my sister (an R&B fanatic for 60 years, and ex-Jimmy Garrison student) what she thought of hip-hop. Just for asking that question, I was met with a torrent of four-letter words that I can't mention here. and we rushed out of the restaurant, and made our separate ways home.

He didn't seem to understand English too well back then. I was just reading the Mark Murphy bio by Peter Jones, and he was so desperate for publicity for his album, that he appeared on The Dating Game back in the 60s. I doubt that he told them he was gay, but he was the winner! LOL! All he cared about was showing the audience a copy of his latest album. His date was the actress Susan Strasberg. They won a 'dream date' to Greece. He said she was only four feet tall! I looked for it on You Tube, but I couldn't find it.

Yeah, the few times they showed it!

Yeah, like they wouldn't show the bedroom on the Dick Van Dyke Show. Bedrooms and toilets didn't exist for some people. TTK mentioned it. I always thought it was More Science HS. They were so great. I clicked on your Mash-a-Clown link. I'm gonna have to listen to your radio show. Canada seems like it might be the last sane place in the world!!!

I remember when it first came out, they were all upset about the character Mongo's name, because they said it was making fun of mongoloid people. i wonder how Mongo Santamaria felt? Now they're doing this? I once got banned for a week from a music forum for jokingly using the name Commie Martyrs High School" from the Firesign Theater Porgie Tirebiter album. I tried to tell the Moderator that it was from a comedy album, and not some political statement, but the jerk wouldn't listen to me! Now even public radio isn't going to play any Firesign Theater albums on the air? That stuff got me through high school! I was just reading a book on Donald Fagen, and he was being interviewed in some magazine about some radio station refusing to play the song "Janie Runaway" as the focus track for their Two Against Nature album promotion. The interviewer rightly asked him if it was due to decency or family values concern, but Fagen answered it was because the song had a sax solo, and the station had a policy of only playing songs with guitar solos! LOL! This was in 2000, and Fagen said they didn't care about seedy lyrics at that time, in fact they loved it. The moral climate of the country was such that you could talk about screwing your grandmother, and they wouldn't mind it, as long as it had a guitar solo in it. So I think we can say that the moral/political climate of the country has radically changed since then.

That's what it seems like.

Yeah, I cut and pasted it from my email notification. I also cancelled my subscription to their channel.

They've all been deleted. Basically they were as complimentary as is humanly possible, and then mentioning how it was much superior to the one I paid $40 for and drove into another state for. I guess i should know better than to compliment anything. It's bound to be dissected, and some ulterior repercussion extracted from it.

Yeah, but they were perfectly happy with ejumacated responses like, "Duh, that's some really swingin' stuff there I tells ya!" etc... I keep forgetting I'm on the interwebz, where no one understands what anyone sez...

LOL! Here's the post they made: WDR BIG BAND "Does this really belong here? It would be desirable if there were many more different ways of engaging with PW's music. But your objection that one German band and only one American band is dedicated to PW's music doesn't change the situation and gives a negative flavor." Do you understand what the MFs are trying to say?

The WDR big band recently released a concert they had performed in 2022 under the Phil Woods Legacy title on You Tube that had some meticulous readings of PW's big band arr's that put to shame the US PW Memorial concert held in PA, a year or so after PW performed. Apparently PW revised a lot of his charts, and they somehow got copies of the revisions and performed them very well with stylistic solos that showed they had some knowledge of PW's style. So I wrote a highly complimentary post mentioning the above,along with the statement that there had been too few tributes to PW, and their's was certainly the finest I was aware of, etc... I didn't think much of it until I got an email yesterday from You Tube saying that WDR had responded to my effusive review. I figured they were thanking me for my positive review, but the first words were "I wonder if a review like this belongs here due to its negative flavor. The statement that only a German band and a US band were the only tributes to PW gives a misleading representation of the response to the PW Legacy." I started writing a response apologizing for giving them such a positive review on their concert, and that I'd be glad to delete my praise of their concert, and added the fact that Wynton Marsalis had publicly put down PW over a mic on a jazz cruise that his daughter had attended, and was forced to retract his statement over said mic when he came back from his break. I also added the fact that Oliver Nelson had received several death threats from his big band when he decided to feature PW on lead alto and give him the majority of alto solos in their concerts. I then deleted the first post I made, and all of a sudden, someone erased the entire two posts that both I and they had made on the subject! WTF, WDR?!

Are there any more Walt Namuth recordings available other than the first one that was made available? They would be considered priceless, IMHO.

Thanks. He was a jazz musician before he went to LA and got into the studio scene. The first time Bob Bruno met him, he was selling nude pictures of his Black girlfriend on the streets! They formed a jazz duo together where they would switch back and forth from piano to upright bass. Tandyn started a fight with some record company executives in the parking lot, and wound up in Wash. DC. Five songwriters on one tune. Van Dyke Parks was in there, too.

Didn't Tandyn Almer have something to do with that album? He was a friend of Brian's.

I Ifinshed This is Hip. Jones is a jazz singer himself, so he's very critical of Murphy. He pans so many albums of MM's that I'm surprised he decided to write it at all. I've always liked the timbre of MM's voice, but hated when he would ruin my fave tunes by overdoing the scat and emotionality of his interpretations. Jones agrees with me on many of his records. Then he gets into MM's career when he reached 40, and claimed that MM hit his stride, and produced mostly good work. A strange anecdote involving both of his subjects, Fagen and MM involved MM trying to get the music to "Do it Again" by Steely Dan. He called them up at their Malibu home, and they told him to come over their house. When he got there, Becker answered the door and yelled out to Fagen, "Mark Murphy's here, Donald" Fagen said, "Let him in, I'll get the music". Inside were a bunch of hippies, stoned out of their minds on something or other. Fagen walked in with the record, a pencil and a sheet of musical manuscript paper. He gave MM the paper and pencil, and told him, "I'll put on the record, go ahead".

His family came from Sicily, so maybe he had some influence on someone like Dino. Sinatra tried to deny it all his life, but he had a Sicilian background, also. They came from the same town as my mother's side of the family, Lecara Friddi. I wonder if Laine hung out with Sinatra at all?

I just did a search on it, and I did play in the Ray Abrams Big Band. What confused me is after RA died in 1998, they kept it going under the same name. I played with them in the 1980s. It's now a band that celebrates brooklyn jazz musicians.

Then there's the great keyboard player Dave Stewart who played with all the different Canterbury bands, and Dave Stewart , the pianist for the Eurythmics. There were two Black musicians (three counting Rudy Williams who lied about being the Savoy Sultans Rudy Williams) who I'm not sure who the hell they were. I recorded an album with a pianist named Al "Jabaz" Williams, who used to work for Motown, and then the jazz pianist Al Williams. Then I played in the Ray Abrams big band, and I still don't know if he was the more well known Ray Abrams. Bernard Purdie was the drummer. Maybe someday I'll find out who was who...LOL!

What was the story about Red Norvo wanting to get Red Mitchell in his band and mistakenly winding up with Red Callendar? Then there was Whitey Mitchell to further confuse things. Then there was the time I played a concert at a school on LI, and I asked a teacher what his name was, and he said "Lee Konitz". He was a bass player! Then there was a band that called themselves "Alexanders the Great" with Ray Alexander vibes and drums and Mousie Alexander Drums

There was a George Russell jazz guitarist, too. There was Bill Smith the clarinetist/composer and Bill Smith the jazz guitarist. There was George Handy the great arr/composer/pianist and and the bunch of Handys already mentioned. There were two alto sax players Vinny Dean and Chasey Dean There was Eddie Costa and Don Costa and Johnny Costa I used to work with Rudy Williams (cousin of Mingus) and there was the Savoy Sultans Rudy Williams, who the first Rudy Willams claimed he was, both alto sax players. Everyone still thinks Dick Garcia was really a pseudonym for Hank Garland when he recorded in NY. It wasn't. There was Joe Carbone (sax) John Carbone (Bass) and Joe Carbone (guitar)

My first guitar teacher used to talk about working with him on the phone during lessons. He was always like a mysterious figure to me.

I was listening to an interview with Danny Thompson on his time as a bass player for John Martyn and Nick Drake, and he talked about the session for "River Man". He talked about the violin section, and said that the leader of it was David McCallum. It turned out he was talking about the actor's father. He said that his son became a big actor on the American TV show, I Spy. We all know what series he meant.

Thanks!