The Mule

Very much alive and played Los Angeles this summer. A friend of mine hung out with him two nights in a row after the gig and said he was in a story-telling mood and a very, very cool cat... Evidently, Mr. Cobb is also rather fond of In 'n' Out burgers....

I agree with Brownie. ALPHAVILLE is interesting and a bit of an anomaly in Godard's filmography. I'd go with CONTEMPT and PIERROT LE FOU first.

Man, Jerry Goldsmith and now Elmer Bernstein within weeks of each other. The motion picture industry has lost two of its greatest composers. I thought Bernstein deserved to win another Oscar for his score from FAR FROM HEAVEN. Although it's almost impossible to pick a favorite score of his, I'd have to select TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD which has one of the most beautiful and haunting main themes in cinema history. He will be missed.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/chi...1,5389727.story

I caught the first set at the Showcase on the 11th and it was pretty much as described above. The only difference was when they wandered in before the set, Lonnie Smith popped open the cabinet of the organ and started tinkering with it using a Swiss Army knife. Lou wandered by and said "Don't monkey with that thing too much. We don't want blue flames shooting out of it!" On the whole, it was a very entertaining show. Glad I saw it. There was a nice review in the Chicago Tribune on the 13th and it ran with a big photo of Lou and Smith.

To another one of my first internet pals... HAPPY BIRTHDAY, SHAWN!!!

Word on the street in Hollywood is that the movie is great and Foxx will get an Oscar nomination. There's always a chance that's just a lot of industry hype, but the trailer looked pretty damn good to me....

Lon, I can only echo the sentiments of Dan and Dr. J.. You are one of the first friends I made on the jazz boards and it's amazing to think of how far back we actually go! Your knowledge, insight, and extreme generosity continue to impress. Here's hoping your week improves and that you'll have some fun this weekend... HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!!!

I agree. SHADOWS still holds up. It's coming out on dvd via Criterion in September. Read about it here.

One of the all-time greatest. PLANET OF THE APES PATTON CHINATOWN ALIEN LA CONFIDENTIAL R.I.P.

You mean "David's Big Adventure?" ugh. Frankly, I think most of the season has been off. Glad Ali G is back!

I have had perfect vision my entire life until very recently (I'm 42). In the past year or so I've noticed the street signs getting more and more blurry--especially at night. It was never that big a problem as I usually know where I'm going and/or I could figure out what the sign said by guessing. Anything backlit--like advertising signs at the airport--were very blurry. Seeing the score of a basketball game on television was getting pretty iffy. I was more or less ignoring the problem until I had to go to Montreal for work. Not only was I unfamiliar with the city, but the street signs were all in French and I could no longer guess what they said! I finally broke down and went to the eye doctor. Guess I'm near-sighted, which is weird because I read A LOT for work and I still can see fine up-close. Everyone else I know my age who had to get glasses had to get reading glasses. I've got the opposite problem. Although I really only need them to drive, I pretty much wear my glasses all the time now. I've got the rimless kind too, Chuck, now I'm worried they'll start cracking like yours have!

Jacquet also plays bassoon on "Caravan" from his album THE KING.

Sums up my feelings entirely.

For EVERY performance? There are crowd shots during the day and at night. In the Anita O'Day sequence you can see the audience and O'Day in the same shot often.

I've never heard this claim before now. What do you mean, exactly, by "filmed later?" While I'm willing to believe that some of the crowd shots used weren't filmed during the actual performance they've been cut into, they were obviously filmed while somebody was on stage playing at that festival. I suspect you overstate the case. There may have been instances where there was only one camera covering the band--the Monk performance comes to mind, which was basically one shot of Monk at the piano--and Stern used cutaways to the crowd from a different performance, but that certainly does not appear to be the case throughout the entire movie.

Obviously a different gig, but the trumpet player kind of looks similar to the guy in the mystery photo as well...

Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War by T.J. Stiles From Publishers Weekly: "In a lucid reexamination of one of the nation's most notorious outlaws, independent historian Stiles argues that Jesse James (1847-1882), like his fellow "bushwhackers," had a political agenda and that this made him more terrorist than bandit, and more significant than we credit. "He was," Stiles says, "a political partisan [wh0] eagerly offered himself up as a polarizing symbol of the Confederate project for postwar Missouri."

Damn....I think I might have to finally declare a winner....

Fullness Gerald Wilson, big bands and the rewards of non-suicide by Greg Burk The year was 1946, and Gerald Wilson was on top. His big band was about to hit the road with 13 dates of fat paychecks. He was co-billed with Louis Jordan, “the biggest man in show business at that time.” He’d been making music with Ella Fitzgerald. He’d already scribbled reams of charts for the hottest outfits — Ellington’s, Basie’s, Lunceford’s, Calloway’s. His singer was the great Joe Williams. And what happened then, Mr. Wilson? You overdosed on smack, right? Your manager split to Singapore with your bankroll? You crossed cudgels with your drummer and ended up in traction? Your wife turned lesbo? You got sick and had to cut out your own pancreas with a rusty sardine tin? Dammit, this isn’t some bonehead rock star, it’s Gerald Wilson, one of the world’s most respected bandleaders since the day when jazz was considered popular music. (And that’s a long time.) So what really happened at that moment? “I had it all then,” says Wilson, sounding amazed, flanges of white hair jutting from under his Legends of Jazz baseball cap. “And I said to hell with it, I don’t know anything yet, I gotta go study some more. So I came home — Los Angeles was my home — and I started studying all the classical music I could get into.” After Wilson had soaked up the subtleties of Beethoven, Stravinsky, Villa-Lobos and the whole longhair gang, he went back on the circuit armed for anything. “Everything happened for me,” he says. Wilson aspired to play professional trumpet, to write and arrange, to record with the best, to play Carnegie Hall and the Hollywood Bowl (annual site of the Playboy Jazz Festival, where he performs this weekend). He did it all, and he’s not finished. The rest of us slobs, struggling with the challenges of parallel parking, can look at the Wilson story as some kind of miracle, or we can suck some inspiration from it. The latter, sad to say, becomes rather more difficult when you learn that (surprise!) Wilson is not like everybody else. “When I was 10 years of age,” he says, “I already knew what I was going to do. I would be playing the trumpet, and I would be writing music.” So he buckled down, and grabbed his opportunities. (Sounds simple, doesn’t it?) He made his own reputation by creating his own sound. Sage tips from Edwin Wilcox, an arranger from Jimmie Lunceford’s band, reinforced early clues from Wilson’s pianist older sister, who had tuned his ears to classical methodology. “We’ve got 12 notes to work with,” says Wilson. “Wilcox always used to say, ‘Gerald, try to get it full. Build it up so you’ll have the harmony going.’” You know how so many big bands blare loud and thin, sounding like 30 kazoos in a giant washtub? Wilson explains the reason: simplistic horn charts, which negate the whole point of having a roomful of instruments at your disposal. Bend an ear, though, to the Wilson school — “Blues for the Count,” for example, from last year’s New York, New Sound, where pianist Kenny Barron’s introduction fools you into thinking you’re hearing a straight 12-bar, then Wilson eases the whole orchestra in with a range of dizzy colorations that’ll make you sit down before you fall over. And in contrast to standard procedure, Wilson’s horde consistently swings from the bottom, his mass of trombones supporting the bass to lay down a deck that could carry an aircraft squadron. At times in Wilson’s music, you hear touches common not only to Ellington, but to the large ensembles of Charles Mingus, not surprising since both the Arizona native Mingus and the Mississippi-born Wilson came up in Los Angeles — Wilson pronounces it with a hard G — and the two were friends, as well as members, along with Buddy Collette, of Les Hite’s influential band. Another local touchstone was Eric Dolphy; in 1960, when the green avantist cut Outward Bound, his first album as a leader, the very first tune was a swinging, harmonically boggling extravaganza. Title: “G.W.” It’s time to recount some of Wilson’s credits, so settle back. Six Grammy nominations. Forty years as a California college educator, currently at UCLA teaching a class of 480. “Gerald Wilson Day” tributes in Mississippi and Chicago. Awards from numerous foundations, publications and municipalities, national and international — he especially prizes one from the city of Los Angeles. The awards do, however, come with certain difficulties: “I’ve got no place to put ’em anymore.” Musical and political progress have counterpointed each other for Wilson. He was a member of the first bands to integrate Las Vegas stages and hotels; more to the point, he numbered among the musicians who spearheaded the amalgamation of the black and white Los Angeles Musicians Unions that took place in 1953. In fact, he was the lucky dude picked to make the motion that brought the matter to the table: “It was quiet. Nobody could believe what I was saying.” As we talk, we’re sitting in his choice of location, the Musicians Union building on Vine Street, built a few years before the amalgamation. Photographs in the hall freeze time at points three or four decades ago, with Elmer Bernstein, Andre Previn and Zubin Mehta sporting Hollywood-hepcat hairdos, and integration represented by the likes of Eddie Harris, Joe Williams and Art Davis. It’s important to Wilson that classical and jazz (“the two technical musics”), white and black, be seen side by side, as equals. At this point, only an idiot would argue for distinctions. But there are those still alive who remember when it was different. Wilson’s big band itself is a slice of history. Many of the players on board at the Bowl have been Wilson friends as well as musical cohorts for decades; Snooky Young first blew trumpet with him some 60 years ago. Vocalist Barbara Morrison has long ranked as one of our region’s snazziest club attractions on her own, and Wilson is stretching the generations by inviting back Renee Olstead, the 14-year-old singer who tore the Bowl down last year (which would account for why it recently underwent substantial renovations). Far from conceding that jazz is on the fade, Wilson insists that Olstead and another local phenom, teenage pianist Austin Peralta, as well as the young orchestras he’s recently led in Norway and Switzerland — not to mention his own continued popularity — are living proof of the opposite. “At first I tried to kill myself.” Wilson slides out a little grin, as if he’s going to serve up one of those gruesome Behind the Music stories. But it turns out he’s just talking about coffee — “I was drinking a whole pot of coffee in an hour, did that for years” — and cigarettes, both of which he quit cold turkey. Quit drinking, too. Wilson is a small man, but a determined one. He has put aside everything that hindered his creativity, and kept whatever helped it. In the latter category are his faith, nurtured from his youth in the church with his pianist mother, and his wife, Josefina, source of support and inspiration — her Spanish heritage connected him not only with the Latin music he’s known for exploring, but with the bullfight, which became a special passion. “The first bullfight I saw frightened me,” he says, relating how he shrank back in the stands. “I thought the bull was gonna come up and get me.” But eventually he came to know many top matadors, composing themes for a number of them. It’s hard to say which Wilson identifies with more — the bullfighter or the bull. He talks about the origins of the sport, how a feudal lord’s servants would forage the countryside for food, and the only animal they had trouble bringing back was the wild bull. So they devised all the feints and passes that are now used in the ring. Wilson’s favorite moment isn’t the kill, it’s the indulto. “The man has now won, and he just makes the bull do anything he wants him to do. All of a sudden he’ll just throw everything down — he’s on his knees, looking right at the bull. The bull is frozen. “Of course, sometimes you’ll get one that doesn’t know the routine.” The Gerald Wilson Orchestra performs at the Hollywood Bowl on Sunday, June 20. See Jazz listings for an overview of the rest of the Playboy Jazz Festival program. And Wilson has been nominated for an L.A. Weekly Music Award in the Jazz Eminence category.

Back to the Bass by Matthew Duersten A rowdy, punk-ass bitch-plucker (Photo by Mitchell Haddad) “Shit!” In the recording booth, John Heard grips the Bitch by her shiny brown neck and scratches his white beard. “I’m not getting the subtleties here. It’s becomin’ a hang-up now.” At 65, the bassist is one of L.A. jazz’s unsung veterans, documented on over 400 releases from the likes of Count Basie, Ahmad Jamal, Oscar Peterson, Cal Tjader, Art Pepper, Lionel Hampton, George Duke and Toshiko Akiyoshi. The self-taught Heard describes himself as “just an old, rowdy, punk-ass motherfucker,” and in his deep rasp of a voice and hard-swinging pizzicato you can hear his rough hometown, Pittsburgh. Perhaps Heard has been hamstrung by his deference to his fellow musicians, his reluctance to take solos (Count Basie once commanded one on a song he had written especially for Heard and was flatly refused) and — believe it or not — his natural shyness. “John Heard puts himself down to the extent that it’s ridiculous,” bassist Don Thompson once told jazz critic Gene Lees. “He’s one of the best bass players I’ve ever heard. The only person who doesn’t know it is John!” Heard’s one date as a bandleader took place in 1983 for the tiny L.A.-based ITJ label and wound up going the route of so many independent jazz projects: The distribution fizzled, the label went belly up, and Heard has the master tapes stashed in his Toluca Lake garage. Not long after that, on his 50th birthday, he walked away from music to pursue his first love: painting. On a recent sweltering three-day weekend, Heard and “the Bitch” — his nickname for his 174-year-old Tyrolean bass — came out of retirement to record his first album as a leader in 21 years, this time backed by two producers with serious music-biz cash & carry, Stewart Levine and Bernie Grundman. He assembled a new group with pianist Danny Grissett and drummer Lorca Hart, up-and-coming college boys young enough to be his grandchildren. “I picked them because of their open-mindedness, and their ability to get that pocket, that pulse, that drive I call ‘the Oneness,’” says Heard. “When you’re relyin’ on one guy, you’re not as inspired. A real leader of a band lets you express yourself — that’s what Ahmad did for me.” The new disc, also featuring saxist Herman Riley and trumpeter Nolan Shaheed and slated for early 2005 release on Straight Ahead Records, amounts to a concept album of American jazz composers, with two Horace Silver songs, “Doodlin’” and “Soulsville” (which the 75-year-old pianist, who lives in the Palisades, heard and loved); Sonny Rollins’ “Valse Hot”; Wayne Shorter’s “Lester Left Town”; Randy Weston’s “Little Niles”; and Benny Golson’s “Along Came Betty.” Grissett’s peppery, quirky arrangements don’t encase the songs in amber but shoot a bit of that elusive contagiousness called “swingin’” into their veins. It is a true live jazz session, with no overdubs or techno-frippery; if a take isn’t completed, the music halts and simply starts again from the beginning. “I’d like to see John stretch a little bit on this one,” says Grissett, directing from his piano bench. “He hasn’t done any solos yet.” During his sabbatical from music, Heard tore up the ends of his fingers doing sculptures. “I couldn’t have played if I’d wanted to,” he says. “It took a long time getting back into it” — four years in various pickup bands at the Van Nuys jazz club Charlie O’s, to be exact. Now, as Heard listens impassively to the playback, heels up on the wheels of his chair, clasping his glasses in one hand, he squeezes his eyes shut and grimaces. “Did my hand break? I’m lousy on this one.” He goes back to his booth with the others and plucks the solo again. He tries three times. “Punctuation,” he mumbles, “punctuation.” The band files back into the control room. “I don’t know how much more of these I have in me,” Heard kvetches. This time, his bass comes through, heavy on the top and the bottom, shivering the speakers with its rich, woody tone. Heard listens and nods his head, and an impish smile slowly creeps across his face. “Yeah, that’s it, that’s it. The Oneness!” John Heard, Danny Grissett and Lorca Hart play Vibrato on Friday and Saturday, June 4 and 5.

It was the 70s. I was the Christian Slater character in HEATHERS. High school felt like prison. I did my six hours a day and when school was out drove my rusting '75 Firebird to my job loading and unloading trucks in a warehouse. Working with guys who were "lifers" in shipping and receiving motivated me to go to college and get the hell outta there. Music, movies, and books were my salvation.

Whenever I'm giving one of these jazz "starter sets" I usually include Coltrane's BLUE TRAIN, Brubeck's TIME OUT, or Blakey's MOANIN'.

Think I'll have to screen this tonight as tribute. One of my favoriate Tony Randall moments is at the very beginning, before the credits, where he is sitting behind a drum kit playing the 20th Century Fox fanfare. After the buh-rump-bump, buh-rump-bump, buuuuh-rump-bump part, he jumps up and finishes by bowing a stand-up bass. Wonderful stuff. RIP

You might want to check this site out to learn more: The John Cassavetes Pages